Balsamic salad dressing

Put 1 clove garlic in in the thermomix and chop at speed 7 for 3 seconds

Insert butterfly

Add:

Freshly ground pepper
Salt 
3/4 cup olive oil
1/4 cup lemon juice
2 tablespoons balsamic vinegar
Blend at speed 4 for 1 minute

pour over leafy greens and enjoy!

originally published by me in 2011 at Forum Thermomix

Salad with pear, feta and pecans

If you are tired of the same old lettuce, tomato, onion combination - try this!

Dump a pile of leaves in a bowl, I used a prewashed 4 leaf mix and added some rocket from a friends garden for extra zing.

Slice up a pear into lovely matchsticks - leave the core in (thanks Jamie Oliver for your clever hint). I used a Corella pear because they looked so pretty.

Toss the pear over the salad greens. Then add feta. You could crumble it over but we had danish feta which is extra creamy and becomes sticky rather than crumbly so I chopped it into small pieces.
Coarsely chop about 2 tablespoons of pecans and sprinkle that over too.
Drizzle with 1 tablespoon olive oil. I used this find. It is infused with lemon which adds extra zing. Love it.

Squeeze the juice of a lemon all over. Season with freshly ground salt and pepper.

Ta Da! All done. Four serves at 4 ProPoints per person.

We served it with turkey breast, radishes and green tomato chutney - delicious lunch!

Points free peach icecream - delicious mess in a bowl!

Start with a jar of peaches in natural juice - I can't reember what that weighs but I used the whole thing. Spread it on a tray covered with a silicon baking sheet (like the one from Chef's Toolbox)
Freeze until solid. Mine went in a couple of days ago (hence the frost)
Fold up the sheet and break off the chunks of fruit. Place in your Thermomix
Process 20 seconds at speed 7

Add 100g natural yoghurt (I used Greek) and insert the butterfly
Blend 20 seconds at speed 4

That's it. Serve and enjoy. You can go for elegant, or hungry. We were hungry. It was delicious.

This would work equally well with apricots. Or mangoes

Chicken with rice (tweaked)

We treated ourselves to the new Weight Watchers cookbook "Takeaway At Home" this week. So tonight I gave the Arroz con pollo (chicken with rice) on page 67 a try.

I dashed out at lunchtime to buy the ingredients
Mexican chilli powder - what's that? could I use taco seasoning - I made a small mountain of that in the Thermomix following this recipe but maybe I should try following the recipe first and tweak it after? So I bought a jar of Mexican chilli powder and found its twin in the cupboard when I got home (I have NO idea what recipe we bought that one for!)

So I got chicken tenderloins rather than thighs as it was easier to get the right weight, but I could not find a 310g can of corn so I grabbed the 420g can instead.

Came home and pulled out the trusty Chefs Toolbox saute pan. You only need the tiniest bit of oil and use a silicon brush to spread it.

In with the chicken which took a while to brown and I didn't want it to look white in a pot full of rice. SO I left it in one side of the pan while I added the onion to the other side and kept it browning

Then I added the capsicum and zucchini

At no time did I need to take the chicken out. Maybe the WW test kitchen only has small pans - you know like they get us to eat off small plates to get our heads around the serving size problem behaviour?
Mexican chilli powder. 1 teaspoon. Well that doesn't sound like a party does it? So I chucked in two.

And stir

And add the corn (remember I used the whole can) and tomatoes - well in our case one huge tomato that looked like the Schwarzenegger of tomatoes from a friends garden, the aroma when I cut i was amazing.

The CT pan has a fantastic twist lid so you can seal it completely (that's the trick to a stove top pizza or no stir risotto) so it was perfect to leave for 25 minutes to cook without my attention. I took the Kid to Kung Fu and went to the park with the dog. While I was out someone took it off the heat at the right time, put it in the Thermoserver and sprinkled it with lime juice and coriander. Thai coriander which looks like this:

because I don't have the other kind in the garden

Here is the finished product (yes he took a photo too!):

It was absolutely delicious - nice and zingy and I put it through the recipe calculator - guess what Weight Watchers - I got it down to 6 Pro Points a serve (serves 6) - yes I managed to lose 4 points a serve out of a new WW recipe. Go me! Oh and you should all go buy that book. Do it now.

Coconut and apricot loaf

We had a guest chef at the Cafe Disarray recently

And she whipped up a cake so easy you could not even simplify it by putting it in the Thermomix. Well maybe you could use the machine for the chopping. But that didn't actually take long.

So the original recipe came from the legendary NMAA Cooks which you can buy here but the guest chef's twist is to add a cup of chopped dried apricots. So easy and DELICIOUS!!

You just mix the following ingredients:

1 cup dessicated coconut

1 cup SR flour

3/4 cup white sugar

3/4 cup milk

1 cup chopped dried apricots

Mix well. Cook in loaf tin  (I used my CT loaf mould) in a preheated oven at 180 deg for around 40 minutes 

 Remove and allow to cool before turning out and slicing

That's all! How easy is that? At 5 Weight Watchers ProPoints a slice make sure you are sharing with friends

Nom nom nom

Low fat shaksuka

This is based on Israeli Shaksuka - a dear friend shared her breakfast recipe with me

Tonight we were out till almost 7pm and needed dinner in a hurry

I put 2 cloves garlic in the Thermomix for 3 seconds at speed 7

Then added 2 medium onions and a red pepper, chopped 4 secs speed 5

Add 1 tsp cumin and 1 tsp paprika

Add 800g diced canned tomatoes (this is also great for using up a garden tomato glut)

Cook 9 minutes 100 degrees speed 1

You will know it is done when the aroma assaults your senses

Pour into a pan on the stove which has a wide base

And add your eggs. Tonight we are having two eggs each. 

Simmer in the pan until the whites are cooked. Leave the yolks runny.

Scoop out into a bowl, sprinkle with parsley and serve

Only 4ProPoints per person so you can add crusty delicious bread - How awesome is that?

Barbecue breakfast and curried sausages

We cleaned out the UFOs in the fridge
Leftover Chinese food (one of the boys works at a Chinese take away) and pizza
We had some leftover sausages

Just try Googling "Weight watchers curried sausages" and prepare to read fifty bajillion whiny blog posts about "I ate all that and now it's worth SO many points" So I Googled "Thermomix curried sausages instead and hit this post

It has HEAPS of vegies which will help with my Healthy checks today after the official Cafe Disarray Fathers Day breakfast which started like this

and included these 

as well as this

This is not what I ate

I don't have step by step pictures because blogging was not really on my mind. I only had 330g of chipolatas not 500g of sausages so I didn't do all the steaming nonsense at the beginning at all - just cut up the leftover snags. I used coconut oil in it because I seem to have a jar of the stuff in my cupboard, not really sure why I must have needed it for something. It was pretty good for frying the pancakes in this morning. Our dish ended up looking like this and was a total of 37 ProPoints or 6 points per person plus points for the rice we served with it. And it was DELICIOUS!