It's a Beautiful Life - Anniversary - Beetroot Salad with Honey Mustard Dressing

Life is beautiful ... and so is my loving wife. I am so grateful I can be married to such a wonderful woman. Yesterday we had our wedding anniversary and it was a delicious day.

For some wedding anniversary may mean to get a gift for his wife like jewellery or something along that road. As for my wife she is very happy and content when I cook something lovely and delicious for her. Now you can judge for yourself what is easier, buying a piece of jewellery or passing quite some time in the kitchen cooking up something delicious.

Did I mention I was very grateful?

Well then, let's get into the food. First of all we started off with something healthy, a beetroot salad.

Ingredients:

2 pre-cooked beetroots, finely sliced

60 g lamb's lettuce

140 g mango, cut in cubes

20 g pumpkin seeds

20 g shavings of parmesan

Red wine vinegar

Olive oil

1 tsp Mustard

1 tsp Honey

Salt, pepper

Method:

The ingredients serve for two plates. This makes sense completely. After all, it was for our anniversary that we were celebrating the two of us.

Arrange the slices of beetroot on a plate, well two plates. Build a circle if you fancy so.

Arrange the lamb's lettuce in the center of the plate.

After that toss on the pieces of mango and the pumpkin seeds.

Then shave over the parmesan, maybe with a potato peeler.

For the dressing mix one part of red wine vinegar with triple the amount of olive oil in a jam jar, for example, together with the mustard, honey and salt and pepper. Dress the salad with ... eh ... this dressing.

Enjoy! Side fact: The beetroot is supposed to be good when you want to build muscles. If not, it's good anyway.

Of course, there was more. For the main plate I cooked up a nice and gorgeously crispy pork belly. It was so awesome.

The crispy pork belly was plated up with some browned potatoes and mushrooms glazed with a good knob of butter. I say it was very delicious. Did I mention the pork belly was so crispy with an awesomely good crunch?! Well, just wanted to make sure of it.

We had a lovely glass of white wine with it, a glass of Albariño, my wife brought along from A Coruña, Spain. Wonderful!

Then we finished the meal off with an espresso or two. But there has to be something more to it ...

... yes, of course, cake. On the inside a chocolate part and a vanilla part. Very good combination. All around it was coated with a chocolate ganache.

Thank you very much for joining us on our anniversary and for taking the time to read this blog post right to the end. All in all it was a really lovely day. Yes, life is beautiful!

Fitness, Leftovers and some Energy Bars

As we already established the last time, I'm not really going away but I will pop up time and again with something new on this tiny blog. Whether anyone cares or not, that doesn't really matter. I care and this is sufficient for me.

So what have I been up to lately? These last few month I have been doing a lot of fitness at home and this way I have bit by bit turned our living room into a gym, much to the nuisance of my wife. However, she humbly endures it. On my way I have discovered quite a few workout videos on YouTube. I started out with some Spanish videos but they seemed to be rather for women. Well, if the instructor keeps on saying 'Vamos chicas! Con alegria!' then it really seems to me like this. 

So I switched over to some guys. I did quite a lot HIIT workouts with Joe Wicks' videos and some with Alex Crockford. Finally, I ended up with the crockfit app from the latter when since he had a good offer I couldn't resist and, that is if you really stick to it, the results are quite impressive and I can only recommend it ... Well, now as it is, I just keep on going ...

While being into fitness doesn't mean, I am not going to eat a lot ... well, I kind of do it in a more controlled way now, so it isn't really clashing with my fitness goals, although I am getting braver now.

Along this line then, I got a recipe for some energy bars today. I increased the amount of protein they have by adding some leftover protein powder I had sitting there in the kitchen. Mainly, though, it's good fats and carbs.

I would say I whipped them up using leftovers as I didn't buy any additional ingredients apart from what I had already in the house. I wanted to have some honey or sugar syrup in it to bring the ingredients together. For that purpose there was a jar of sugar syrup lingering in the fridge. It was a gift from some friends. They meant well, but normally I am not so much in eating this syrup on bread as many others around here would do. This way this jar would occupy space forever in the fridge or it would turn blue or green eventually. However, for this recipe the syrup was just fine.

Ingredients

200 g porridge (or just oats)

78 g protein powder (whatever you have)

44 g peanut butter

64 g mixed nuts, chopped up

55 g ground almonds (they were really leftovers)

105 g dates, chopped up

320 g sugar syrup (or honey or whatever you have in this direction) 

250 ml water (if it's not really coming together otherwise)

Method

Well, you have seen the list of the ingredients. There is not really much telling of what you have to do with all of them. Just throw all the ingredients into a sufficiently large bowl and mix it well together. As the list says, use water if you need so to bring it all together.

Heat up your oven to 180°C (you maybe remember that this is my favourite temperature).

Line a baking tray with greaseproof paper and spread the energy bar dough on it. Do it as neatly as your personality requires.

Once the oven has reached the heat, the energy bars go into the oven for ... have a guess ... no, not 30 minutes, as would be my favourite baking time, but rather only 20 minutes this time. This is completely sufficient.

After that time, let them cool down and then you can cut them into pieces of your desired seize and eat them, gift them, guard them or even freeze them. I cut my mass into 16 pieces and according to my calculations one energy bar has about 169 kcal, that is, if you need to know.

Now let's get back to my exercises and my gym. Have a slight peek of what's there.

I guess there is still missing a little bit. I could really use some more weights, but then again I need to be careful and not upset my wife. After all, it still is the living room. As we don't have so many visitors these days it might be fine like that, but that's not going to last forever.

Now you can have an energy bar right before training or afterwards to fill up your storage again or, as I often do, just use them as a snack at work.

How are you with fitness? Have you been doing some exercise lately? As I was just sitting around most of the time, at work and a lot at home as well, I had to do something. Have you ever thought about it? Do you have some more ideas for fitness food? Just let me know below in the comments.

Thank you once more for bearing with me right to the end of this blog entry. It has been a pleasure writing for you and I hope you liked reading it and will come back in the future or in the meantime you just check out what else there is on this blog.

See ya!

Die Hard with a Vengeance and ... a Zucchini Dream Salad

Yes, I'm still here, still healthy and alive. But then again, so you might have guessed. Right, I haven't been around here much, lately. However, it will be very hard to get rid of me completely. You never know, when I might pop up again.

While I am already here, we could also try to do something useful. I hope it doesn't feel like a vengeance to you. As I choose this for the title of this blog post, in fact, I'm not quite sure where we do have the vengeance here. After all, I'm not really the vengeful type.

Maybe the vengeance results from the other side. Me looking to much at food on the Internet and getting greedy about cooking more again, there had to be consequences. Alternatively, there might be some other explanation as to what happened to me. I will tell you in a jiffy ...

These days I have the custom of getting up early, like shortly after 5 am and even on the weekends I just make it to 6 am or a tiny bit more. Last night, though, sleep didn't like me that much. My brain - yes, there is one - was going back and forth, back and forth, back and ... I guess you get it. Where was it going? Exactly! Food! I kind of dreamt about what to have for breakfast. I wanted eggs and I wanted to do something with zucchini.

From this there resulted my zucchini dream salad ...

As the brain carefully had prepared everything during the night, it was a sure and quick thing to get the salad up and running and being eaten. Here some more details ...

Ingredients (for one person):

110 g shavings of zucchini

2 hard boiled eggs, quartered

6 black olives, cut into three pieces

4 brazil nuts, chopped up

A little bit of lemon juice and olive oil

Salt, pepper, chilli flakes

Grated parmesan

Method:

Yes, here we go. Use a potato peeler to get the shavings of the zucchini. If you like - and that is what I should have done, but didn't - shave off some more zucchini than mentioned in the ingredients.

In a bowl dress up the zucchini with salt, pepper, lemon juice and olive oil. Then arrange on a plate together with the eggs and the pieces of black olives. Sprinkle over the chopped up nuts for the crunch. In fact, use other nuts, if you want to.

To finish off, you can sprinkle over some extra olive oil. Grate over the parmesan and season with some chilli flakes.

Then ... dig in ...

As I mentioned in the outset, I had the salad for breakfast, but naturally, you can have it anytime. It has round about 500 kcal and has its good portion of protein and of course some good fats. So, no worries!

Did you have a similar experience before, like 'dreaming' about a dish that you wanted to cook. I hope you didn't loose too much sleep because of that. Anyway, it didn't do me anything bad. I still felt fine during the day and didn't have to fight fatigue.

I hope you liked my little zucchini dream salad. If you just toss all the ingredients together quickly you have a ... yes, right ... quick meal.

Do you have some recipes like that? What do you prefer for breakfast? Do you have salad for breakfast sometimes? Or strange things?

Thank you for stopping by and thank you for your precious time you invested for reading this little blog post right to this point.

Now I will go on and live free but not ...

Arroz a la Cubana

Why did I waste another two hours of my life? Do you know this feeling? Maybe you started watching a movie and thought you had to finish it only to recognise that it really wasn't worth it. In fact the movie was really stupid and not that entertaining as you hoped at the outset. It could be that it started out good, but then it has an absolutely unexpected useless end and you feel empty taking nothing away from this experience. I'm sure you know this feeling. Have you watched any really disappointing movies lately?

The feeling can even get worse when you apply it to watching series. You devote time to watch a few episodes or even an entire season. Maybe you even enjoy watching it only to be faced with the fact that they are going to cancel the series after the first season. Now you are never going to find out if they really will catch John or if they are going to safe the world or whatever ...

For that part, sadly, I have some experiences. Do you, too?

On the other hand, with watching food shows you are not so much in danger. They make you hungry, give you some inspiration and maybe even make you a bit adventurous. As to that, one of my favourite series is the show 'Somebody feed Phil' on Netflix. Do you have any favourite shows that involve food?

Besides that, I always love a good food and cooking movie. Thinking about it right now, I would say that my favourite one, right now, is 'Kiss the Cook', although ... thinking too much of it, right now, I want a cubano with this crispy bread, the meat filling, the cheese melting in your mouth and ... sadly that's not going to happen. 

That leaves me with my memories of our last trip to the US where we had some cubanos. Strangely I'm just finding out that I didn't take any photos of them, although we had some even at the day of the cubano in New York. Sometimes, this world is really strange.

That could easily lead us to whip up a cubano and write about it right here and right now, but that is not going to happen either. It's not that I didn't try it before or that I will not try it again. However, that would be another story.

Today's story is more simple, although it still has Cuba in it: Arroz a la cubana, something like rice Cuban style. 

Well, you don't really have to call it like that. You could just call it rice with fried eggs, just that simple. But what's the fun in that. You could make a beef stew and call it beef stew, but it just sounds better if you call it bœuf bourguignon. Another example, you could whip up a salad and call it mixed salad or ... for the fun of it ... call it anti-rabbit salad with honey mustard dressing.

I guess you get the idea. That being said, let's get cooking.

Ingredients

Cooked rice

Fried eggs

2 cloves of garlic, finely chopped

2 medium red onions, finely chopped

1 green bell pepper, finely chopped

4 medium tomatoes, finely chopped

Olive oil

Coriander or parsley (optional)

Method

As the list of ingredients suggests we are not going hardcore here. Just cook the rice at your gusto and fry the eggs like you fancy them.

Then we just concentrate on the tomato sauce. Get some olive oil going in your pan. Toss in the onions and the garlic and let them catch some colour. Can you smell it? Do you love the smell of garlic being slowly fried in the pan? I do.

Then add the bell pepper and the tomatoes and let it all come together. The tomatoes should have enough liquid for the sauce. In case not, just add a tiny bit of water. 

If you want or have or like, you can add some chopped up coriander or parsley. Around here coriander is not always easy to get your hands on, sadly. But if I have it I would always add it.

Once all is finished you can plate up, although this is a bit of useless thing to say, more or less. Why would you plate up, if you haven't finished?!

Again, if you want or have or like, you can place some avocado on the side or some cooked or fried plantains. Just as you fancy.

In fact, this dish is something you can plate up anytime as an emergency. Here you have a lot of things you usually have in stock at home ... well I do. You could also use tinned tomatoes instead of fresh tomatoes. 

Here we have come to the end of this post and I hope you don't have to say at the end of reading this post: Why did I waste this time? Well, at least it didn't take you two hours reading it.

On the other hand, if you think, oh what a shame it's already over again. Just stay a little bit longer. Leave a comment. Tell us what your favourite food movie or series is. Do you have an emergency meal? Maybe you have some more examples of dishes getting fancy names or ... as you want.

Thank you for being here and spending some time visiting this humble blog!

See you when I see you!