Waste Free Homemade Popcorn for Movie Nights with a film review from "The inner Circle"

I am very honoured that Michael asked me to pair up with him & the Cheetah for his 100th Film review on the Inner Circle. He is reviewing a real popcorn movie,  a family friendly Hallmark mystery movie that I watched last night on his and Paladins recommendation and I can only agree with them! They reviewed the first mystery of the Aurora Teagarden Mysteries "A bone to pick". Michael & Paladins reviews are non sponsored so you can be sure to get their honest opinion! Michael is very resourceful in finding DVDs on sale ( I read somewhere he never spends more than 1,50$ for a movie). He then puts down 3 dvds on the carpet and lets his ginger cat Paladin, with the personality of a cheetah pick the movie. The movie Paladin sniffs at first is the pick for the next review. So go make yourself some popcorn and enjoy the movie recommended.

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How to make Homemade Ricotta Cheese - simple and fast!

Today I was frantically looking for a kid friendly recipe to use up my left over Rocket salad  (or if you tuned in from the states - you call it arugula) as you know it is a bit spicy. So I came across a recipe for a pasta dish with rocket in it, but it required ricotta cheese, which I didn't have. But I remembered seeing on many pages various recipes for homemade ricotta cheese, stating how simple it is! Well, let me tell you: it is not just super simple but also very fast! If you are not to picky on the consistency you can have it done in under an hour! If you like it more solid it might take 1,5 hours. But as I only needed it for a sauce this was a fast make!

Homemade Potato Chips - an easy and fast guide

Some days just call for not the healthiest comfort food. You agree?
We had more than a hole week of it. And I decided I would share this very simple guide of homemade potato chips with you guys. Shop bought potato chips are often made from mashed potatoes with additives or cost an arm and a leg, when all it needs is a few potatoes! I bake mine in the oven, as I don't have a deep fryer.

I wash the potatoes, if they are new ones, they get to keep their skin, if not, I peel them. Next I chop them lengthwise into chip size.

How to make your own black Elderberry Syrup

Courgette Soup - super simple and fast made

Here comes yet another courgette recipe, that was handed down by my wonderful sister - it is for a super simple and fast made courgette soup!

Psst - Did you know that Courgette Lasagnes are a great way of using up left overs?

Boost Your Spirits and Immune System with a Blackberry Banana Smoothie

My boys are currently suffering head colds, and while fruit normally disappears into their little mouths faster than you can cut it up, it can be hard enough to get some vitamins into them when they need them most. I usually turn them into smoothies together with a natural yoghurt fill it into a boy approved cup add a reusable straw and voila: even little boys will drink a purple vitamin booster when they aren't feeling so well!

Raw Courgette Salad

No matter what you call these green health bombs in your country - they come in many names: Courgette, Zucchini, green squash (and yellow) and there might be more names - their possible ways of uses are endless! As mentioned this week here I will be sharing a few of ours and my sisters favourite recipes during the following weeks!

This week I will share with you one of my sisters recipe!

Strawberry Blueberry Jam - simple and divine!

Making Strawberry Blueberry Jam is no rocket science. In fact it is so super simple that I was seriously considering it unworthy writing a blogpost. But I thought, what if you have never tried this? Simply didn't think of it? This is such a great combination for a jam jar and if you haven't tried it wait no longer. I made 4 different varieties on Monday and this one is my most favourite! I actually only wanted to write about blackberry peppermint jam and blackberry dark chocolate jam. (they will follow) But over the week I fell in love with the strawberry blueberry combination that I simply had to share. Seriously, try it with a dollop of cream cheese on a pancake and you will understand what I am talking  about.

Banana Hazelnut Smoothy - another tasty and fast way to use up those overripe bananas

This is a smoothy my kids and I currently are somewhat addicted to. It is also a great way of using up those overripe bananas.

How to make your own yummylicious peanut butter or any other nut butter

Did you ever look at a label of peanut butter and wondered why it needs all those ingredients? Well, it doesn't! It only takes two! Peanuts and a little bit of salt. The salt is necessary otherwise your butter will taste stale. It has the same impact in peanut butter as it has in bread baking. If you get the amount just right, you will not taste the salt but your butter will taste yummylicious! Two little and you have stale tasting peanut butter. And too much, well that needs no further explanation....

Roasted Hazelnut Chocolate Brownies - A gluten free taste bud explosion!

You can make these very tasty brownies out of any left over nut meal from making nut milk. You can also just use any ground nuts or nut flour, if you have no left over nut meal in your freezer.  These roasted hazelnut chocolate brownies were made out of the roasted hazelnut meal from last weeks roasted hazelnut milk post. They are incredibly moist and rich in taste. Roasting the hazelnuts really adds the extra bit of flavour to these little taste bombs.

Here is the very simple recipe:

Melt 70 grams butter in a saucepan
and add 150 grams of chocolate (I use a mix of 70% and 85% dark chocolate) and stir until melted
add 150 grams of brown raw sugar
and 6 eggs one ofter the other, while risking on high speed for a while after each
and add 2 tablespoons of vanilla extract (find out here how to make your own) Whisk all well
Now gently fold 200 grams of defrosted roasted hazelnut meal (you can add any nut meal here, we have also tried almonds or cashews. Both make very tasty Brownies!) Here you find out how to make your own. You can also use 200 grams of very finely ground hazelnuts (or really any nuts to make a different brownie) if you have no nut meal in your freezer. Be aware if you take ordinary ground (hazel)nuts your brownies will be a little less moist!  Once all is a homogeneous mass pour it into your buttered baking dish (I use a 23cm/9 inch square silicon form that is 4,5 cm in hight)  Now bake in preheated oven at 180C/360F for 15-20 minutes. You don't want to over bake them, rather still have them a little moist instead of bone dry....they should be just about baked.

Enjoy!

How to make your own Roasted Hazelnut Milk - A Step by Step Guide

step by step making roasted hazelnut milk

You might be wondering why adding this extra step of roasting the hazelnuts before making your own nut milk is worth your time. Well, let me give you two good reasons.

 1) roasted tastes so much better and if you add cocoa and maybe a hint of melted nougat you´ll have a vegan homemade Nutella milk and as if you needed more...
 2) roasting hazelnuts helps remove the brown skin around the nuts. This skin is responsible for any bitter taste in the nut milk.

So, now you see why these additional 5 minutes of work are really worth it.

This is what you need:
200 grams of shelled Hazelnuts
4 cups of water + a little extra to soak nuts









Pour your 200 grams of Hazelnuts into your frying pan NO! additional oil. This works fine in my cast iron pan. I have not so good experiences with my ceramic pan!

raw hazelnuts 

Turn the stove on high and keep stirring as they will burn otherwise. Once the smell of roasted nuts has filled your kitchen and the brown skins come off, you can turn the stove off again. This will only take 2-3 minutes at most. Take the pan of the hob and keep stirring ( a normal pan that can´t hold the heat like a cast iron one, you might need to leave on the hob for another minute or two) While you stir the brown skins will start to come off. Enjoy the smell, you are an important step closer to making your own nut milk

roasted hazelnuts with the skins starting to come off

Next, pour your toasted nuts into a sieve and keep rubbing them with a spoon against the mesh to get the remaining skins off.

roasted hazelnuts in sieve 

The very stubborn ones you can rub between your hands and fingers. At this point the roasted nuts should have cooled down enough that you don´t get burned. But be careful anyway.  Thanks to the oils in the nuts your hands will feel really smooth! And don't worry about the discolouration on your skin, it is nothing a bit of soap and water won't fix!

Now, put the nuts into a little bowl, cover the hazelnuts with water and leave them soaking in a covered bowl in your fridge for 12-24h.

soaking hazelnuts

Next morning drain the water off them,
rinse the soaked nuts in sieve under warm water
and then put them in your food processor or smoothy maker,
and add 4 cups of water.

After making sure you closed that lid properly you turn on your machine and let it pulse for a good 10 minutes. You need to do this, for this long to release the oils within the nuts into your milk.
Hazelnuts are very rich in vitamins E, but it is bound in the oils. So if you want to get all the goodness into your milk you need the oils!

I used to make a lot of various nut milks with my Kenwood. The manual said not to let the Kenwood  run longer than a minute at a time in pulse mode, so I did 10 one minute cycles with a 1 minute cooling down pause for my Diva. And you could still get this hot motor smell. I now have a food processor that is better set up for this job and it only needs half the speed setting and still gets a nicer result... What I am trying to say is, you might have to play around a little to figure out what works best with your machine. And make sure not to overheat the motor if it is an elderly machinery or a Kenwood ...

Now for the next step, Pinterest is full of tips and tricks to make your life easier. Let me warn you the one with the french press does NOT work! At least not with my bodum. Maybe the good ones have a mesh that is too fine? The nut pulp plugged the mesh and I couldn't get down more than 1 cm. More force and I would have feared to break my french press.

So here is what I do. I take a burp cloth (I use them instead of cheese cloth as they are washable and reusable) line a jug with the burp cloth and pour the content of your pulsed water hazelnut mix into it.

getting ready to drain the hazelnut milk in a reused burp cloth 

 Get a rubber band and hang it up and drain all the yumminess out of the mix.

draining construction for roasted hazelnut milk

roasted hazelnut milk

Now fill your roasted hazelnut milk into a clean bottle and refrigerate. It will last for about 4-5 days.


You can now scrape the nut meal in your cloth gently into a freezer bag and freeze it. It works great as substitute for nut flour. I collect it until I have enough nut flour to make the most delicious brownies (recipe to follow!)

This is the only nut milk I can drink straight from the bottle. But I also love using it in Smoothies, baking (Hazelnut Carrot Bread) or in my coffee.

Enjoy!

Quark Pizza Roll, No-Flour, Gluten-free, Low-Carb yet absolutely yummy

You might remember last weeks post about how to make your own Quark Cheese. I was asked by some if I could also post some savoury recipes using it.
So here comes a rather unusual one, that we have tried, tested and loved: A Pizza Roll! The Twist, its dough is made without flour, which makes it gluten free and also interesting for those that try to eat low-carb. If you wonder about the spuds in the picture, we ate the roll rather because we love the taste and not because we follow dietary guidelines, sorry guys!

Quark cheese - A love I thought lost

If you ever lived in one of the following countries - Austria, Germany  or Switzerland, you might have grown fond of a type of cream cheese called Topfen or Quark. If you now live abroad and miss it, you need to suffer no more!

Ginger Bug - your first step for homemade lemonade and ginger ale - the old fashioned style

There has been quite a number of Pins on Pinterest showing how to make a ginger bug. It is the base to make ginger ale the old fashioned style.

I did this for about 3 months, but I stopped before our summer holidays.

My verdict: Most likely this is more costly than buying the own brand of some cheap shop, that only costs a few cent per bottle. And it does take some preparation time! It also is a softer kind of fizzy, it is hard to describe! But you know what you drink and don't have added food colouring or taste enhancing and shelf life prolonging additives. And you help the environment by not buying plastic bottled drinks.

Let´s talk Mirabelle plums! We harvested 18 kg this weekend and preserved them in various ways.

Mirabelles (I added a link as I have recently learned that they are banned in the US right up there with the Kinder Surprise Eggs and Hagis. Who would have thought?! )

These little plums the size of a yellow cherry taste divine!






Pitting them can be a bit of a chore, if you do it with a little knife like us. The stone comes out a bit easier if you cut a long the line shown in the picture.

And here comes a public service announcement: USE A STAINLESS STEEL KNIFE! If you do not you will have a reaction between the metal in your knife and the acid in your fruit and your fingers will look like mine for a week or longer....Or if you do use that old granny knife in your drawer, just because it happens to be the sharpest in there....well, make sure you are not meeting people for the next week, you´ll get some queer looks or be smart enough and wear gloves....!


Back to the Topic: I read online that if you have a cherry pitter you can use it, but I have not tried this and I believe it will only work if the Mirabelle plums are super ripe!

Every now and then you find a little added 'protein'! You better not be squeamish, as these move faster than you think!

Here are some of the recipes we made this weekend:

Mirabelle Jam
Prepare your jam jars! Either boil them and the lids separated (as in open jar) in a big saucepan full of water for a few minutes, or boil your kettle and fill up the jars and lids with boiling water and let stand for a few minutes. This is the method I have been using for decades now. I have never had a glas break on me while filling it up with the billing water, but I know that that is a fear for some. I once read that you need to do this on either a glas top or a wet towel to avoid this to happen. I have them stand on my ceramic hob which seems to work just fine. It also usually has spilled water on it, which probably helps here, too.

Then empty lids without touching the inside (I just use a big pair of BBQ tongs) and then fill one lid with Vodka. Pour the Vodka from one lid into the  next, until you have them all disinfected. And again without touching the inside! Once the last lid is disinfected I just pour the vodka into the boiling jam.

for 1 kg of pitted and halved fruit you will need
500 gr of gelling/jam Sugar (the one that has citric acid and pectin and you can use a 2:1 ratio of fruit:sugar)
and 1-2 teaspoons of lemon juice (optional)
mix well and let stand for an hour in saucepan with lid (the sugar will drain some of the juice out of the fruit in this time) (if you are in a hurry you could also just add a little water or juice and start boiling immediately)
Bring to boil and let boil at full and while stirring for about 5 min. Then whizz the fruit mix until no 'lumps'. pour straight into jam jars (I use a wide mouthed funnel to help with the spillage) and screw the lid on tight, then turn them up side down and let cool in this position. Label and store cool (as in cellar)

I love my Jam with a bit of cream cheese instead of butter. A recipe for homemade cream cheese will follow soon.

Mirabelle & Blackberry Jam
prepare Jam jars as above
for 500gr of Mirabelles pitted and halved and 500 gr of Blackberries
add 500 gr of jam  sugar (see above)
1-2 teaspoons of lemon juice (optional)
 Proceed as above!


Mirabelle and Lemon Jelly 
This stuff is seriously good!

Prepare Jars as above!

Juice 3 kg of Mirabelles in whole just washed (I use one of those saucepans where you boil the fruit and the juice comes out of a nozzle at the bottom) but I am sure you could use a regular juicer too.

mushing the fruit with the potato masher helps speed things up

add the juice and Zest of 4 Lemons

200 ml of orange juice

Weigh the mix and
add half the amount in grams of jam sugar (in my case a little over a kilo of sugar)
also add 3 cinnamon sticks 
and 5 cloves
now boil until it thickens. Make sure your saucepan is big enough as the mix can get a bit foamy and bubbly when boiling. Fill in Jars and proceed as above!

Mirabelle Gin

Get big wide mouthed glas jar and prepare as above.

Wash 250 gr Mirabelles very well. Then pour some boiling water over them. Drain immediately.
Now layer the Mirabelles with
125 gr rock candy (if you use brown rock candy the gin will get brown!)
Stick half a stick of cinnamon in the middle and pour
Approximately 250 ml of gin over the mix.
The fruit should be well covered.

Screw lid on and shake well! Store in dark cool place for 4-6 weeks. Every time you pass give it a good shake. After this time you should be able to enjoy it. (obviously we haven´t tried our own yet as the mix is only four days old so far but we are very hopeful)

Canned Mirabelle halves

prepare jars as mentioned above

Wash Mirabelles very well, half and stone, fill in sterilised jars and prepare canning liquid.

canning liquid:
for 1 kg of fruit
use 300 gr of jam sugar (see above)
and 1 litre of water
add 1 cinnamon sticks
and a 1-2 cloves to taste.
Bring to boil and let simmer for a few minutes. Remove cinnamon sticks and cloves and pour hot over fruit. Immediately screw on lids. Put all your jars in a big water bath canner or in my case a huge saucepan and bring to boil. Boil for 30 min.

Let cool on a cooling rack and make sure all lids have popped inwardly. Otherwise they won't keep and can even be dangerous to consume (Botulism would be your biggest fear) if any of your jar lids, even after cooling down, did not have their lids plop inwards store in FRIDGE and consume immediately!

Mirabelle sauce

Prepare jars as above.

Wash and stone 3,5 kg of Mirabelles.
Add 1 tsp of ground cinnamon and
1 tsp of ground cloves.
Add 50 ml rum and
300 gr brown cane sugar (I prefer raw)
Mix well and let stand for a good hour. The Sugar will draw the juice out of the Mirabelles, this way you don´t have to add any extra liquid. After this bring to boil and boil on medium heat with no lid while stirring every few minutes, until there isn't too much liquid left (took me 2h). Whizz it into a homogene mass. Pour boiling hot into your prepared jars (funnels help reducing the mess! They also keep the rims of the jars clean) Close straight away and then boil in water bath as described above. Please check those lids before you stack them in your shelves.

Store your canned goodies cool and dark and before you store them wipe them all clean.
Before consuming any canned product you should check those lids again, and when opening them the first time you want to hear this hissing noise and a plop. this shows that there was a vacuum in the jar all the time you stored it!  Check for discolouration and signs of mould. Only then is it safe to eat! I only ever had a handful of jars turn mouldy, these would have been ones were I worked sloppy hygiene wise. Either not wiped clean enough or the rims of the glasses had spilled jam on them, here those funnels come in really handy!

We also halved, stoned and cleaned several kilos and just froze them. So if you have any more ideas let me know! Thank you for any input!

super fast to make sugar and gelatine free healthier jelly bears for your kids or yourself

200 ml orange juice (fresh pressed is more yummy, but from the pack will do just fine)
1 teaspoon of lemon juice (again fresh juiced would be better)
1 package of agar agar/ agartine (10gr)
1-2 tablespoon Honey or any other sweetener of your choice.You could easily make them vegan with rice syrup or agave syrup. I could imagine maple syrup having a bit of a too strong taste, but I have not tried it.

Heat up juice and dissolve honey in it.
Whisk in agar agar.
Whisk until all dissolved.
pour into forms. I used silicon form. If you do so learn from my past experience and put a cutting board underneath.
Chill for about an hour and then dig in. They will be a bit glibbery to the touch, but taste awesome. Even my mom who despises anything sweet, loved them and had not just one, but a few! They supposedly last a week to 10 days in the fridge but they didn't even make it to day 2 in our house as they where all gobbled up in no time.

You can make them in other colours by using different coloured juice/fruit purees. The only no go is pineapple as it won't work.

If you tried an esp. nice tasting  fruit/colour please let me know. Or if you have an idea that makes them less glibbery.