Oatmeal Banana Cookies

When I first started this blog, my goal was to showcase the Portuguese cooking that I miss so much. But this blog turns out to showcase as well the evolution of my food interests and discovery of new ingredients and flavors. For example, I had never even heard about quinoa until I came to Singapore, now it´s one of my favourite ingredients, I could have it every day. I had never used lime (Portuguese cuisine only uses lemon) or simply hated oats. I thought they were tasteless and boring. Now, not only I won´t go out of the house in the morning without having a nice bowl of it, but also keep searching and trying new recipes with oats.

So today I made oatmeal banana cookies and, honestly, these were the best homemade cookies I have ever made and eaten in my life. It has just the right flavours I love.

Ingredients

100 gr of oats
75g of flour
80 gr of light brown sugar
1 tea spoon of baking powder
1 tea spoon of cinnamon
1 large or 2 small ripped bananas
20 gr of olive oil
1 tea spoon of vanilla essence
Dark chocolate chips (optional -  I have no choice but to use them, my son loves chocolate!)

Preparation

Turn on the oven at 180º.

Combine the oats, flour, sugar, baking powder and cinnamon.

On a plate, smash the banana using a fork and add on the olive oil and vanilla. Incorporate this mix into the oats still using the fork, as if you were still smashing the banana. That´s how you´ll be able to blend everything together. Takes about 2 minutes. Then add the chocolate chip, 2 table spoons are more than enough.

After 15 minutes in the oven, the cookies are ready to be savored!

Wholemeal Scones with Chocolate

After posting a photo of scones I made yesterday and getting positive feedback, here I am to share the recipe... and back to blogging. In 3 months, since the birth of my baby, I have been away from writing here on here, not from cooking though. I have tons of writing to catch up on!

I´ve been following this recipe for a couple of years, but this time around I decided to give a try to wholemeal flour. The result: spectacular! Thanks to the gestational diabetes I learned a lot about food and triggered main changes in our family diet, being one of them a bigger consumption of dark flours rather than the white ones.

This is a super simple recipe that I´m sure you´ll love!

Ingredients

- 500 gr flour (250 gr of wholemeal flour and 250 gr of plain white flour. You can only use the white flour if you prefer, just as amazing!) 

- 5 tbs of sugar

- 1 ts of salt

- 50 gr o butter

- 1 cup of milk

- 1 egg

- 1 tbs of baking powder

- hand full of chocolate chips - this is totally optional and you may want to replace the chocolate by other ingredients such as raisins, dried cranberries or nuts

Preparation

1 - Pre-heat the oven at 200º.

2 - In a pan, melt the butter in the milk.

3 - In a bowl, put all the other ingredients, except the chocolate chips, and little by little pour in the milk and butter mixture. Kneed the dough and finally add the chocolate and mix with your hand.  

4 - Cover a baking tray with the baking paper and make medium-sized balls with your hand or with a table spoon.

5 - Pop it into the oven for 10 to 15 minutes. Don´t let the scones overcook, or they will become dry.

Enjoy!

Sweet dreams are made of this...

... sugar, cinnamon, orange. For me these are the flavors of the Christmas season, as many of the Portuguese Christmas sweets have at least one of them. Especially cinnamon! Whenever I smell cinnamon, I smell Christmas!

Recently I have made one of the most popular sweets in the Portuguese cuisine at this time of the year for the Portuguese Christmas Party in Singapore, called "carrot cakes". The literal translation would actually be "carrot dreams" and they are nothing more nothing less than fried batter. Traditionally, they are either made with carrots or pumpkin. This time I used carrots, but they can be replaced by pumpkin.

Last year I posted a recipe to prepare the carrot cakes, but now I´ve tried a new one that I think to be even better. Here´s how to...

Ingredients

750 gr carrots
370 gr sugar
370 gr flour
3 eggs
Peel of 1 orange
Juice of 1 orange
1 tea spoon of baking powder
Oil to fry the cakes, sugar and cinnamon

Peel the carrots and boil them together with the orange peel until they are soft. Drain the water, remove the peel and puree the carrots. Then add all the ingredients by the following order: sugar, orange juice, eggs and finally flour, always mixing (it´s better if you use a mixing machine). The batter should rest for a few hours. Then deep fry table spoons of the batter (max 5 minutes), remove the excess oil and roll the cakes a mix of sugar and cinnamon.

The carrot cakes are ready to be savored!

All I want for Christmas...

Christmas has arrived earlier for me and my family... Lucas was born last friday, December 13th, and he´s so gorgeous and so sweet! Everything went so well, he´s healthy and he has not inherited the diabetes from me. So what better way to celebrate than with a box of doughnuts from Krispy Kream?
 
This American company recently opened its 1st shop in Singapore right next to the hospital where Lucas was born, so I had agreed with my husband in advance that he didn´t need to come to visit me with flowers, because all I wanted was to roll myself in sugar! And that´s what he did, he brought me doughnuts :)

Obviously I didn´t have all this myself, only ate 3 and it felt SOOOO good! Since then I haven´t really taken sugary food, I just needed to end my diet in a memorable way and understand all this fuss around Krispy Kream doughnuts!

Let the Christmas celebrations begin!

Last Saturday we had our 1st Christmas celebration of the year, also the 1st Portuguese Christmas party in Singapore for the Portuguese parents & children. The occasion couldn´t have been more perfect to meet other Portuguese parents, but also to share our traditional dishes at this time of the year. It´s amazing how we all have in common this passion for cooking and for keeping our Portuguese traditions alive miles away from home. Most Portuguese women I know and have met at this party have a genuine interest in cooking and are excellent cooks from what I could see.

Four large tables were hardly enough to place all the food that everybody prepared, from pies to cakes, meat, desserts and all the very typical Christmas delicacies that no one can resist... except me, due to the gestational diabetes. Hard though this might be, I try not to make many exceptions in my current diet, specially now that I´m only 2 weeks away from my due date. Yes, 2 weeks!

My contribution to the party was codfish cakes - that disappear in a blink of an eye! - and carrot cakes. Last year year I posted a recipe to prepare the carrot cakes, but last Saturday I tried a new recipe that it´s even better! I´m going to post it this week... unless Lucas decides it´s time to go to the hospital :)

For now I leave you some photos of our 1st Portuguese Christmas Celebration in Singapore and mouth-watering table!

 

Delicious Quiche in 15 minutes!

Looking for a super simple dish without compromising the flavours? Here´s one good example - a quiche of bacon and spinach. I made this recipe for the first time a few days ago for a potluck and it was a hit!

Ingredients for the dough:

200 gr of flour
90 gr of butter
45 gr of water
salt
1/2 teaspoon of sugar

Mix these ingredients altogether and kneed the dough. This should take about 5 minutes. As it doesn´t need to grow you can roll out the dough immediatelly by putting some flour on the counter and with a rolling pin roll it from the center out until you get a round shape. Place the dough on a round tray with a detachable bottom.

Ingredients for the filling:

150gr of bacon
150 gr of grated cheese, any you like
A hand full of spinach
4 eggs
200 gr of cream

Place the bacon, cheese and spinach on top of the dough. You can choose replace the bacon and spinach by other ingredients you like. I personally think bacon makes everything better! Then mix the eggs with the cream and pour it into the tray as well.

Bake the quiche in the oven for about 25 minutes at 180º, until the top gets this beautiful golden brown colour.

Could this recipe be any simpler?

New recipe to prepare croquettes

Some time ago I posted here a recipe to prepare croquettes, but I got a much better one from another portuguese friend and excellent cook. First experience didn´t go that well only because I couldn´t shape the croquettes properly. Now I know that the trick is in using more flour and in letting the meat set for at least 24h in the fridge.

I didn´t count them, but with 1 kg of meat I would say I got at least 80 croquettes. These were served at Lucas´ baby shower and were a success.

Ingredients:

I used the thermomix to prepare the croquettes, so everything is in grams.

1 kg of minced beef

chouriço (just enough to add some flavour)

1 onion

2 cloves of garlic

2 carrots

150gr of tomato (you can use canned tomato)

Olive oil

For the bechamel sauce:

350 gr of water (use the water from the meat)

250 gr of milk

200 gr of flour

50 gr of butter

salt, black pepper & nutmeg

Preparation

1 - In a blender, chop the onion, garlic, tomato and carrots and pour it into a pan with the olive oil. Let it cook for a few minutes.

2 - Add the minced meat and the chouriço and cook everything for about 15 minutes.

3 - Drain the water from the meat and mince it for a few seconds in the blender. Put it aside and keep the water.

4 - Start preparing the bechamel by mixing 350gr of the water (I had to add extra normal water to get the 350gr) with 250 gr of milk. Add the flour, butter and seasoning and cook everything until you get a tick cream.

5 - Then mix the bechamel sauce with the meat until you get an homogeneous paste and let it stay in the fridge for about 24h, can be more. 

6 - After the long wait it´s time to shape the croquettes, dip them into a beaten egg and roll them on  breadcrumbs. Keep the croquettes in the freezer and whenever you want just take them out and deep fry them. Better not fry them right away.

Enjoy!