cooking with red amaranth- Frugal Friday

Red Amaranth is a delicious leafy vegetable that I had no idea what to do with. Lifting the lid of my Foodconnect box, sitting pretty up the top of the vegetables, I first wondered what it was and then what the devil I was going to do with it?

Plenty it seems. It’s used in Asian and South American cooking and can easily be used as a substitute for spinach or any other leafy greens.

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In a flat bottomed wok add,

diced garlic

sliced onion

vegetable oil

sesame seed oil

Cook it up for a few minutes and then add

amaranth leaves (any other leafy green vegetable you might have, spinach, silver beet…)

a slurp of kecap manis (Indonesian sweet soy sauce)

a slurp of fish sauce

stick a lid on it and let it wilt down. Team it up with a bowl of basmati rice.

In the flat bottomed wok, crack an egg. Cook it through, and pop it on top of the rice and amaranth (leafy greens).

Back to the wok, add a small handful of local nuts (sesame, pecans, peanuts, whatever you have in stock…).

Once toasted add to the top.

 

 

 

Strawberry Vanilla Birthday Cake

Birthday time and I wanted a simple cake, with not a crazy amount of sugar, no colours, kid friendly, easy to make, to be enjoyed by everyone and truly delicious…(small drum roll), please step up Strawberry Vanilla Cake.

Strawberry Vanilla Cake

cake part

150 gms butter softened

3/4 cup caster sugar

2 tps vanilla

1 1/2 cups s/r flour

3 eggs

Cream butter and sugar together. Add vanilla and eggs one at a time. Fold in flour. Bake cake at 180C for approx 1 hour (on 2nd shelf). Once out and cooled, cut carefully in half.

icing

300gms mascarpone

1/2 cup icing sugar

1 scraped vanilla pod

whip it all up in a mixer or with a hand held whisk and then layer half of the mixture between the cake with a layering of freshly sliced strawberries. Top layer of cake on and mascarpone mixture smoothed over and decorate with strawberries.

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A really simple cake, that was thoroughly enjoyed, keeps well in the fridge for a few days and doesn’t lose any of its charm over time. (We ate this one on Little Monkeys’s birthday, now officially two.) I did catch Monkey Boy trying to get the “hair” out of his cake- he was trying to get the vanilla pod seeds out.