Unexpected combinations: Beets + Orange + Chili + Hokkaido Squash

Today is one of those days where I started cooking with a vague idea in mind and it turned out great! I may even have discovered my new favorite salad!

These are the heroes of our dish: Hokkaido squash, oranges, beets!

And this is what our finished dish looks like: Ovenbaked hokkaido squash with a beets and orange salad with a sweet chili dressing.

Ingredients: 

• 1 Hokkaido squash
• 3 oranges
• beets (I had one big one, but just try to match the volume of the oranges)
• a bit of fresh ginger
• two garlic cloves of garlic
• some olive oil
• agave sirup
• sriracha (or sambal oelek or any other chili sauce)
• salt
• pepper

optional: a few pomegranate seeds for decoration

a bit of soy sauce

Himmel un Ääd - Traditional Rhineland Cuisine with Apple Sauce

Die deutsche Übersetzung findet ihr unter dem englischen Rezept!

Ah, regional cuisine. I come from a place where some roasts are made with horse meat, and most dishes are served with some sort of sausage. Fortunately I have a wonderful man by my side who has mastered the skill of making variations of vegan sausages. He already announced, I'd have to post sausage recipes as well. And I will - eventually. I'd love to include some pictures of how he makes them, so I can post step-by-step instructions.

Today, I am posting a quick recipe that can be mostly prepared in advance. It's very easy, tastes amazing, and may introduce you to food combinations that you may not have experienced unless you live in the Rhineland. We call it "Himmel und Erde" (Heaven/Sky and Earth), but the regional dialect says "Himmel un Ääd." It's called "Heaven/Sky and Earth" because you mix two things that grow in different places: Heaven/Sky stands for the apples, earth for the potatoes.

Himmel un Ääd

Vegan food is boring, doesn't taste good, but that's probably because it's mostly kale.

Ah, I love hearing "But then... what DO you eat?" and "What are you allowed to eat?" Fortunately, I'm allowed to eat anything I want, except I chose not to eat some things.

So, today, I won't give you any recipes, but only things that may illustrate all the things I eat. :)
If you see any thing you like and want the recipe, just let me know and I'll post a blog on that specific dish!

The only thing better than making chocolates is sharing them with awesome people!

Since the roughly 80 to 90 chocolates I made the other day would most certainly ruin any longterm goals of fitting my clothes, I decided to give some to my friends. I will be seeing quite a few of them at my friends' private vegan café (Café Mousebear), I made spent a very relaxed and quiet Sunday morning crafting boxes for the chocolates.

I can't wait to go eat all the awesome cakes and pies and cupcakes that my friends have prepared for their guests. Who can say no to a pumpkin cupcake with a cinnamon/walnut topping? Or homemade thyme raspberry lemonade? 

Delicious, Creamy, Caramel/Nougat Chocolates

One of my favorite chocolates are called Toffifee. They are made of a caramel cup filled with a whole hazelnut and nougat and are topped with a bit of dark chocolate. The best. But they are full of milk products such as skim milk powder, concentrated butter, whey, lactose... Having found a recipe on another blog, I decided to accept the challenge of making my own. Based on the outcome of my own experiment, I made some changes to the recipe.

I am fairly happy with the results - the taste is definitely spot on! But I wish the caramel had gotten a little harder. This is the main reason I am making adjustments to the recipe.

I ended up with ca. 85 chocolates!

Ingredients:

The simple things in life: Bread

Die deutsche Übersetzung findet ihr unter dem englischen Rezept!

Nothing tastes (or smells) better than freshly baked bread. Baking does not require elaborate tools, machines, molds or ingredients. Bread is awesome.

Having grown up in Germany, I am used to an abundance of different types of bread. Wheat, rye, spelt, oat ... I must have eaten well over 50 types of bread over my life. I'm not too great with sourdough yet, but I'm working on that. Last night, I decided to bake some bread. I don't really eat white flour products, unless we're talking pasta or cupcakes (and other tasty sugar bombs), so of course I opted for whole wheat. As opposed to regular white wheat flour, whole wheat flour is rich in calcium, iron, and fiber. I added flaxseeds (and some sunflower seed oil) for some extra omega 3 fatty acids.

Whole Wheat Bread with Flaxseeds

Ingredients

• 400g of whole wheat flour
• 20g of gluten (if you don't have any, that's fine. Just add a bit more flour. The gluten helps with the fluffiness of the bread)
• 1 pack of dry yeast
• 12g of salt
• 60g of flax seeds (or any other seeds/nuts you like: pumpkin, sunflower, walnut, hazelnut...)
• 3 tablespoons of awesome oil (canola oil is great, so is sunflower, ...)
• warm water

Carrot Ginger Soup

When life gives you carrot, ... make carrot soup.

Preferably yummy soup that doesn't look like baby food. Fresh ginger, coconut milk and a bit of good vinegar should be on the list.

Since the local organic veggie box from my last blog came with a lot of carrots and I still had about 700g left in the fridge, I decided not to give them any chance to spoil and made a big pot of soup. And please notice the incredibly awesome R2D2 soy sauce dispenser the boyfriend got me for our 9-year anniversary. That man knows how to please the ladies! <3

Carrot Ginger Soup

Ingredients:

• 1kg of carrots
• 3 onions
• 2-2.5l of veggie stock
• 3-4 medium sized potatoes
• 1 leek (how do you call pieces of leek? The German word would be "Stange" which would literally translate to "stick" oder "bar") 
• 500ml coconut milk
• 100g tomato paste
• a big chunk of fresh ginger
• more ginger
• some olive oil
• salt
• agave sirup
• 5 table spoons of white wine vinegar

Almost like Christmas!

Word of mouth informed me that there was a small organic farm in the north of our city. Word of mouth continued to inform me that they delivered weekly veggie crates! Being the person that I am I got overly excited about it and ordered the largest version they had available. Today was finally the day of days! The box got delivered! The boyfriend even suggested we'd do an "unboxing" video. I was tempted to do that. Then I was to lazy and only took pictures.

Rain and other yucky October weather didn't keep the driver from bringing this colorful beauty to our place. I truly feel like I am a little too excited about a collapsable plastic box full of vegetables. But that's okay. Other people go crazy over shoes with a red sole. I guess when my braincells were programmed, I got lots of those "books and food" ones and very few from the fashion department. Fine with me.

And here it is in all its glory:

The Perfect (and Healthy) Milk Shake

For some reason I never liked bananas. I have no idea why that was the case, but that's what I had to deal with most of my life.
I recently decided to give bananas another go and it turned out: Bananas are awesome. Maybe the minions (see below) had something to do with my change of mind.

So now, I am starting to discover the beauty of banana based food. My current favorite: Banana Chocolate Milk Shake! It takes a bit of prep time, but the type of prep time, where you do one thing and the let it sit for a while while you do whatever it is you want to do. You also need a blender and a freezer.

The Perfect Banana Chocolate Milk Shake

Ingredients: 

• 2 ripe bananas (even if they're a bit riper than you'd usually like... this is a great way to use up "not so pretty" produce)
• around 200ml of oat milk (we're utterly in love with "Smelk" by Kölln)
• 2 tablespoons of cocoa powder (not the sugary type you'd use for hot chocolate, but the pure, good cocoa) 

Spicy Hokkaido Squash Soup

It's soup season again! Finally!

We were fortunate enough to have the boyfriend's mother grow some fine examples of hokkaido squash for us and I could not wait to turn it into soup. Can you go wrong with hokkaido squash soup with orange juice, ginger, and sambal oelek? Yeah, I didn't think so. 

Where's the difference between a squash and a pumpkin? I'm not a native speaker of English, so I'm always excited to learn new things. My mothertongue German only has one word ["Kürbis"] for both types of vegetable, so I never saw a reason to distinguish between the two different vegetables.

So this was lunch for the boyfriend and me and also served as a nice present for my parents when we came to visit them.

The good thing is that soups like these do not rely on exact measures and diligently counted drops of ... something. Here's the rough draft of what I used and how I made it:

Spicy Hokkaido Squash Soup 

Ingredients: 

• 1 hokkaido squash 
• 500ml of veggie stock (we make tons of it and then freeze it)
• 500ml of pureed tomatoes 
• 300ml of orange juice
• 200ml of white wine (optional)
• 3 onions
• 2 cloves of garlic
• some oil of your choice 
• a varying amount of sambal oelek, depending on your preferred level of heat)
• 1 can of coconut milk (I think I used around 400ml)
• a chunk of fresh ginger
• salt
• some pumpkin seeds

Welcome to Squirrel of Nom's Tasty Treats!

Ever since I started posting pictures of my food on facebook (yes, I'm one of those people), I have been asked to start a café, a bistro, a restaurant, a lunch service, or... at least (!) a food blog. I am hereby giving in to those demands! Here is Squirrel of Nom's Tasty Treats for you!

I am going to post pictures of food that I've made, and might also include recipes when possible. I'm saying "when possible," because - in my kitchen - cooking and baking always involves a nice dash of throwing random unplanned ingredients into pots and pans to see what happens. If I'm in a rush or don't see the point of explaining how to boil the perfect potato, I may not post a recipe immediately. You are always welcome to ogle the food my friends and me devour. A quick request for a recipe has never hurt either, so if it's not there, just remind me that there is someone who would actually like to know how I made a particular dish.

Since I'm a vegetarian, none of my recipes will involve dead animals. Instead I have opted for mouthwatering plant-based awesomesauce that usually even tends to be on the healthy side. (Let's face it. When it comes to cupcakes, that statement is a stark lie.) The majority of my recipes will be vegan and involve plenty of ingredients from organic farms and fair trade companies.

I am thinking about posting this blog in English and German. Which language would you prefer? If you speak German, would you mind that the recipes were in English?

Give me your feedback and some ideas on what you would like to see!

I am looking forward to reading from you!

- Squirrel* of Nom

*Squirrel because of the color of my hair!