Meatloaf with mushroom sauce

Meatloaf with mushroom sauce

I have made this meatloaf a few times, and it's always delicious. This is the first time I have made it with the mushroom sauce. I was quite impressed!

The first step is to make the meat filling for the meatloaf. I didn't have time to freeze my rump slightly first. I found that missing this step didn't make too much difference to the outcome of the resulting mince. I also discovered something new about my Thermomix during this process! When using a guided recipe, and it asks you to turbo something a certain number of times, up the top of the screen it counts the times for you so you don't have to keep track. I don't know why I had never noticed that before!

Before rolling

Once the meatloaf filling is made, you need to lay it out on strips of prosciutto. I do this on a piece of strong foil, add the ham and cheese filling, and then use the foil to roll the meatloaf firmly into a log. In the picture you can see I have left a bit of prosciutto without meat on it. This gives a little extra to go around when it's rolled, and helps prevent the filling from falling out.

The recipe does say to lay the meatloaf straight on the varoma tray. I usually leave it in the foil, so it stays together nice and tightly. It also ends up with less mess at the end!

This is where it become a kind of "all-in-one" meal, as the sauce is made in the bowl, using varoma temperature, while the meatloaf and vegetables steam in the top. I did actually increase the speed to speed 2 for this step, just to make sure I didn't have to add any extra time to the cooking. I also prefer to put my vegetables on towards the end of the cooking so they stay crisp. I don't like soggy broccoli!

Mushroom sauce

 

Once the sauce meatloaf and vegetables are finished steaming, the rest of the sauce ingredients are added. I did end up adding another splash of water to the mushrooms, because most of the liquid had evaporated - probably due to me increasing the speed.

I removed the sauce from the bowl, then added in some potatoes and followed the chip recipe for mashed potato. When I make mash, I usually don't add the butterfly until I need to whip the potatoes. The butterfly tends to fall off a it as it gets knocked by the raw potatoes, so it's easier to wait until the whipping stage before adding it.

While the mashed potatoes were cooking I heated up a frypan and removed the meatloaf from the foil. I put the meatloaf into the heated frypan and browned it, which made the prosciutto nice and crispy.

Sliced meatloaf after browning

Overall, it was a delicious meal and was enjoyed by everyone. I did cut my potatoes up a bit too big, and it was a little lumpy, but these things happen! If I had cooked it for 5 minutes more they would have been perfect. However I had a hungry little 5 year old hassling me for his dinner so we just had to be happy with a few lumps!

Happy thermomixing!

Broccoli Salad

Broccoli Salad

I'm back! It has been quite a while since I posted, having gotten a little sidetracked by life - family, work, my Thermomix business, going on a cruise holiday (so much fun), Christmas - the list goes on! I also had a little mishap with our computer dying when we returned from holidays, which is where I had my list of meals I had blogged from the Basic Cook Book. I have finally got around to replacing my computer, and ended up having to manually go through the blog to re-do my spreadsheet to see where I was up to. So, here I am!

I have also started a new way of eating - the 5:2 diet, or intermittent fasting. It involves eating 500 calories only 2 days of the week, and eating normally the rest of the week. Today just happened to be a fasting day. I usually try to drink water, tea, coffee and a miso soup through the day and save the majority of my calories until dinner. I had some leftover zucchini slice in the fridge, so decided to have that for dinner. It was only 192 calories for  slice, so I decided I would have a salad on the side. I had a broccoli in the fridge, so thought it was high time that I made the broccoli salad from the Basic Cook Book.

This is a very similar method to the beetroot salad and coleslaw (which if you have ever been to a Thermomix or two, you probably would have tried). All the ingredients get chopped into Thermomix sized chunks (pretty much small enough to fit through the hole in the lid - no need to get too fancy!). Add the yoghurt, lemon juice and seasonings and mere seconds later, you are done.

Ingredients before chopping

The salad was surprisingly tasty. I'm not really a huge fan of broccoli, but I will suffer through it because I know it is very good for you. However, I was quite happy with the raw broccoli in the salad. Mixed with the other ingredients and the light dressing, it had a lovely flavour. And so low in calories, I was well under my calories for the day.

I will definitely be doing this one again. Its a great salad to have in your repertoire when you need to whip something up quickly.

Skinnymixers LCHF chicken kiev and beetroot salad

Skinnymixers LCHF chicken kiev and beetroot salad

I have been meaning to make this recipe for quite a while, but just hadn't got around to it. I had some chicken in the fridge that needed to be used up by today, and since it was Sunday and we didn't have anything planned, I decided to have a go. The recipe can be found on the Skinnymixers blog site here.

The recipe is really easy to follow. It has three components - the coating, the herb butter filling, and the chicken. I was a bit concerned about frying the chicken in a pan, because I have a tendency to burn things when I get distracted by cleaning the kitchen.

Chicken mixture 

Once you have all the parts ready, they need to be assembled. It is important to make sure that the chicken covers the herb butter evenly, or they will spring a leak as they do their second cook in the oven. The last thing you want is to lose all that butter goodness onto the baking tray!

Chicken mixture after blitzing

I fried them in olive oil on a medium heat, for a few minutes on each side. They were only just brown. I was pretty pleased with that, as usually I would end up with burnt bits. It then goes into the oven to finish cooking. It is quite quick to cook, because the chicken is relatively thin on the outside, despite the entire kiev looking quite thick. Remember there is a big wad of herb butter in the middle so the centre doesn't need to be cooked.

Adding the herb butter filling

I was pretty happy with the outcome, only a couple of them leaked a little bit. They turned a lovely golden brown and had a nice flow of herb butter flowing out of it when I sliced it open.

After coating is added

I served the kievs with a beetroot salad. This is the one that is in the Basic Cook Book. I have been making it a bit lately - at demos! But I hadn't actually had it myself at home, so I thought I should probably try what I am feeding people at demos!

Its a lovely fresh salad, and the lemon juice and oil creates a little bit of a dressing through it. I put the salad on top of a bed of baby spinach leaves, so the leaves got a little bit of the salad dressing on them too.

Happy thermomixing!

Quirky Cooking's walnut & raw cacao nib bliss balls

Walnut Almond and Macadamia raw cacao nib bliss balls

These bliss balls have to be among the best I have ever made! They are like truffles, they are so rich and tasty.

I had a container of raw cacao nibs in my pantry, and they have been there for so long I can't remember what I got them for. I know I got them after my Thermomix, so less than 10 months, so they are still good to use.

I happened to see this recipe come up in my newsfeed on Facebook yesterday, so I shared it to my wall, meaning to make it in the afternoon. But then cocktails happened, and the bliss balls didn't! Oops!

So this afternoon I decided to give them a go before I forgot about the recipe. The picture of them on the Quirky cooking website looked delicious. If you would like to give them a go yourself, you can find the link here.

Since I have just started following a primal style diet this week (I have cut out most grains - still using a little rice flour, and still having full fat dairy), I have been on the lookout for portable snacks. I have a pile of bliss balls in the freezer but I was getting a bit bored of the same flavour.

I had a whole pile of different nuts in the pantry - everything but walnuts! So I decided to make them with almonds a handful of macadamias.

Raw cacao nibs

The power of the Thermomix is clear in the recipe - raw cacao nibs are pretty hard little things, and in 20 seconds the Thermomix makes them into quite a fine powder. Once the raw cacao was milled, I added in the dates, but I strayed from the recipe and just threw everything else in and did the final 1 minute blitz. It didn't seem to make much difference, they still came together just fine. There was no particular reason I did this, other than I wasn't paying attention to the recipe so much as the ingredient list.

Milled cacao nibs

After the one minute of blending everything together, its just a matter of rolling them into balls. I find this quite therapeutic! It surprised me how oily the mix is at the end. The high speed blending for 1 minute warms the ingredients up, even though no temperature is set, so this helps the cacao to release the cacao butter. It makes a lovely moist bliss ball! I really liked the vanilla flavour in it. It would be quite nice to do peppermint ones, with some peppermint oil or even rum flavoured ones for Christmas instead of the traditional rum balls.

Mixture before rolling

Who knew I could talk for so long about a simple bliss ball!

Happy thermomixing!

Protein shake

Protein shake

I felt like having a smoothie of some sort today, and remembered this one from the Basic Cook Book that I hadn't tried yet. It has nuts and seeds in it, plus an egg for an extra protein boost. The egg is optional - some people don't like the idea of raw egg, but as long as it is fresh I don't mind it.

I didn't have any frozen raspberries in the freezer so I used the mixed berry option, hence the purple colour! It was really tasty and quite filling. I had it around lunch time and actually forgot to have something else to eat. It wasn't until about 3pm that I realised I hadn't eaten lunch, aside from an apple, so it did keep me going for a while. I had more than one serve though - I kept the rest to have tomorrow morning at breakfast.

I will definitely make this again. Its easy to keep frozen berries in the freezer and all the other ingredients are ones that I always have on hand.

Happy thermomixing!

Ricotta dumplings with Napoli sauce

Ricotta dumplings with Napoli sauce

Another wow dish from the fabulous cookbook Everyday cooking for Thermomix families. I have enjoyed everything from this book so far, so if you have a TM5, and have been thinking about purchasing this book and/or chip, then do it! You won't regret it.

Draining ricotta

The first thing that is done for this recipe is to make ricotta. First of all, I had never even considered making my own ricotta before having this recipe book. I had no idea it was so easy! Two ingredients that most people would have in their homes, and a little bit of time, and voila! you have ricotta. If I wasn't making it for this recipe, I might have added a little bit of salt to it too.

Drained ricotta

I didn't have any cheesecloth, muslin or a nut bag to drain the ricotta once it had separated from the whey, so i just used a clean tea towel. Now that I know how easy this is though, I think I might have to invest in some cheesecloth. Its fairly cheap at kitchen shops, I just haven't really had a use for it before.

The ricotta is use to make up a mixture for dumplings, which is all done in the Thermomix bowl. Then they are rolled into little balls and placed onto the varoma, to steam over the top of the Napoli sauce that has been cooking away while you roll the dumplings. It doesn't' take very long for the dumplings to cook at all.

Steamed dumplings

The dish is delicious just on its own. I was going to serve it with a few pieces of sliced chicken breast, but I found it was quite filling and didn't need it.

Happy thermomixing!

Chilli beef with lemon feta

Chilli beef with lemon feta

Wow! This one is an absolute winner. It was quite spicy, so the kids didn't have this one. I would give them some if I left out the cayenne pepper though. I was probably a little heavy handed with that!

The first thing that is made is the lemon feta. I always get danish feta, which is lovely and soft and creamy, and this is what the recipe requires. It definitely wouldn't be the same with regular feta. The addition of lemon made it even better! It made a lovely condiment to take away some of the heat of the main dish.

Lemon feta

The rest of the meal takes hardly any time at all to cook. I do think I might not have got a very good cut of beef though, because it was a bit tough. The next day when I warmed up the leftovers though, it was a bit better. Perhaps it needed cooking just a little bit longer on the first day. It all depends on the meat you have.

I served the dish with a little bit of crusty sour dough bread on the side, and it was perfect just like that.

Happy thermomixing!