http://budgetbytes.blogspot.com

I really want to plug this site because I’ve been using it a lot lately. I was referred to it by a friend and have been referring it to other people ever since! I actually made the sushi bowl recipe today and it came out quite tasty. Her instructions on making sushi rice were very clear and it turned out delicious. There are also dozens of other recipes on the site which are very affordable and easy to make. This is the first that I’ve made so far, but I know a lot of people who are trying them already and enjoying their taste and the savings financially. Ideally I’d recommend this if you’re living on your own and have to cook for yourself on a tight budget; i.e. a student. I wish I had found this site about 3 years ago when I was starting out in that same situation! Enjoy <3

It’s been forever since I posted a food related entry! I actually made this meal the other night but never got around to uploading the photos off my camera until recently. Anyhoot. If you’ve ever gotten pre-made curry paste, it is truly delicious. This was made with Thai Kitchen Red Curry Paste. There was a recipe on the side of the jar for a curry sauce, that I very loosely followed. I added two tablespoons of the curry paste to one can of coconut milk simmering in a tiny saucepan with two tablespoons of brown sugar and about a teaspoon of Teriyaki sauce, and let that go for a while. In the meantime I sautéed half an onion, a whole red bell pepper (capsicum) half a green pepper and one shredded carrot and two chopped stalks of celery in another pot. Then I fried a package of tofu with garlic salt and basil in a separate frying pan. Also cooked a cup of rice on the side. Once everything was cooked and ready I poured it all together in bowls and garnished it with some cilantro from my garden. Delicious!

I’ve been falling behind in my posts! Not much exciting happening, hehe. I’ve had a lower appetite than normal lately, but now and then I still get the urge to cook. I bought the ingredients to make these neat sounding samosas that I have a recipe for in my veggie cook book. They were cashew coconut samosas, and they turned out to be delicious!

The starting ingredients, minus the dough I kneaded by hand a bit earlier which was at the fridge at this point.

The fried up mixture being put into individual dough squares

These were the ones that looked a little more like what samosas are *supposed* to look like.

Into the frying pot they go! This part terrified me. I hate frying things, and since we couldn’t find our deep fryer, I had to improvise.

This is how I protect myself from hot oil splashing back.

Golden goodness!

The delicious outcome with some dip I made! Yogurt, mint and cucumber.

They were delicious! Definitely a repeat.

You can find the recipe here. Hopefully the link works! It’s a link to a google book page, showing the page of my cookbook that this recipe came from.

I made the dough from scratch following this recipe.

So yesterday I ran out of bread and couldn’t find the kind that I wanted at the store. There was some nice bakery bread that I had had last week but the store that I got it from was really far, and I was in no mood to go get it. So I decided that I would use this opportunity to make my own!

I got a recipe online and saw that i had all of the ingredients and went at it!

Beating the dough.. it wasn’t long before I realized this was a horrible tool to use once the dough got a lot thicker!

After the dough had risen and then I had to punch it around and roll it down. There was a lot of labour involved!

They look so weird before they expand and rise!

This is the third amount of time they spend rising.. this interval was about an hour underneath a wet towel. The towel couldn’t touch the bread so I had to make a funny arrangement. Brad and I watched Equilibrium during the rising times. Yay for killing time!

Brad hard at work after the movie was over and we wait even more for the dough to rise..

Look at it go! It’s already starting to smell good here

The tasty finished product!

Okay so this isn’t the most flattering picture of me, but hey. You can’t go wrong with fresh bread and Nutella!

So all in all.. next time.. I STRONGLY recommend that you read through the entire recipe and directions FIRST. I ended up spending 5 hours making this bread (mostly rising time) and was up until midnight cleaning up after myself! So yeah. Next time, bread is definitely an all day endeavour!

I opened a new container of plain yogurt which I like to keep around for smoothies, and under lid on the sealing foil was a recipe. I usually disregard these because they’re normally just excuses for you to make normal every day things but with a huge chunk of their product, but it actually sounded interesting. Sweet potato soup with cilantro! Two of my very much up there favourite foods. So I made a list and got the stuff I needed and tried it out! I have to say that it was a success I think I put in way too much cilantro and disgusted Brad, but I really LOVE cilantro. There was an option of using parsley instead, I may try that later for his sake. But dang, I loved it!

So I had these two bananas that I had bought originally for smoothies, but I didn’t eat them fast enough. This resulted in brownish softy bananas. I decided that there was no way I would eat them like that, but I remembered that soft bananas were good for cooking with. So I checked some recipes and found out the one that I had everything for was the crunchy peanut butter and banana muffins. The recipe was simple enough. I had never made anything with crunchy peanut butter before. The ingredients were pretty simple, brown sugar, oats, 2 bananas, flour, an egg, peanut butter, salt, baking powder.. and probably something else I’m forgetting to mention.

So far, this will be the third recipe that I make from the 500 muffin recipes book that I bought a couple weeks ago with Brad. I’ve been trying some pretty obscure recipes, and so far they’ve all been pretty good. Of the three that I’ve tried, none of them have stood out a whole lot, but I did choose rather obscure ones. (Like the mashed potato ones, and chocolate zucchini ones) I should try a traditional one like chocolate chip muffins or oatmeal something and see how the recipe holds up.

Here’s the final product, they were quite tasty I’m not a huge fan of banana, but I’m sure they’re a lot tastier in these muffins than they would have been at that stage in a smoothie, haha.

I had bought a leek and some other vegetables last week to cook a vegetable soup. But of course I only needed one leek, and the store had 3 grouped all together. I also had an entire bag of onions and potatoes that I didn’t want to go bad. I knew that there was such a thing as Potato Leek soup, so I searched it online and this is the first thing that popped up. I realized that this too was a blog kind of like my own, but much more professional! I tried her recipe for the soup and loved it <3 Brad said that it just tasted like liquefied mashed potatoes, but oh well. I love it.

Oh no, I missed two days! For some reason I thought I only missed one, but I guess it had been longer than I thought. Oh wells, I didn’t really cook anything the other day, actually had to catch up on eating all of those leftovers! However, last night I made muffins from the book of muffin recipes that I got on Tuesday. I tried two recipes; Mashed Potato muffins and Chocolate Zucchini muffins. Both turned out really well!

The mashed potato ones were essentially just… mashed potatoes! I started off by making mashed potatoes normally, just boiling them up and then mashing them all together, added minimal spices and whatnot, and some fried onions as well. Mixed it all together and spooned it into a muffin tray and baked them for 40 minutes. I was worried that they would burn or something. But the funny thing is, they almost stayed exactly the same! It was literally just.. baked mashed potatoes. Little buscuit sized mashed potato.. muffins. I don’t know if I’d call them muffins, but they were still super tasty!

Okay now the Chocolate Zucchini muffins were another story. I know some of you are probably thinking.. What? Zucchini muffins? Isn’t that like… a vegetable? Well, it is. But zucchinis are actually a type of squash, and they get really soft when you cook them. Think of it like pumpkins. Pumpkins are a member of the squash family as well, and when you bake them, they get soft and you can make delicious things like pumpkin pies! So zucchini end up tasting something like that when you bake them in a dessert or something similar.

So these muffins were really good too, but not as amazing as I had in mind. It called for lemon zest and I think I put in way too much. Well it said 1/4 tsp but I think i packed it down too much and ended up with way more lemon than I should have. Needless to say I think I’ll be the only one eating them.. If you lived nearby I would share!