Roast Tomato Sauce

 

A few days ago I was thinking about what an average day of food would look like for me if I were to write it down on paper. It made me realize that I really am a creature of habit when it comes to my everyday meals. I will eat the same thing over and over until I either think of a new dish I want to eat or until I get sick of it, which doesn’t happen often.

One of my everyday go to meals is always pasta. I choose corn or gluten free pasta that has minimal ingredients, and I will always go for a tomato and vegetable based sauce. I use organic tined tomatoes, and add in whatever vegetable I felt like buying at the start of the week and will try and add in as many colours as possible as it is a good indicator for a wide variety of vitamins and minerals.

But this week I decided to spice things up a bit, as I have recently been trying to make more of my food from scratch (namely almond milk, as I was a little put off by all the extra ingredients in the store bought ones). It has been going great so far so I decided to recreate an all purpose tomato sauce that could be used on pasta or pizza or a simple flavoured sauce to use in place of bottled tomato sauce which I would smother all over oil-free baked potato chips, and this is the recipe I came up with!

Healthy eating doesn’t always mean using crazy hard to find ingredients, it’s also just using simple, natural, fresh whole foods, which are the easiest way to include healthier dishes into your life. If you’re not a fan of using garlic or onion you could easily cut them out of this recipe and it’d still be delicious.

Homemade Roast Tomato Sauce

Plant based – Gluten Free – Dairy Free

Makes: 550 ml (just over 2 cups)

Time: prep- 15 minutes

Cooking- 50 minutes- 1hr

Ingredients

- 8 tomatoes, quartered

- 6 garlic cloves

- 1 onion, cut into wedges

- ¼ tsp ground turmeric

- 1/8 tsp fennel seeds

- ¼ tsp chili flakes

- Pinch pepper and salt

- ½ cup fresh basil leaves

- 1 tbsp rice malt syrup (or any liquid sweetener – ie. honey or coconut nectar)

- Juice of ½ lemon

- coconut oil, for greasing

Method:

- Preheat your oven to 170C, and grease a roasting tray with coconut oil.

- Chop the tomato and onion, and pace them on the roasting tray. Break off 6 cloves of garlic from a bulb, remove any of the outer bulb casings but leave the individual garlic cloves casings on them. This protects the clove from burning in the oven. Lightly press on each garlic clove to break it open a touch, then place them on the roasting tray with the tomato and onions.

- Sprinkle over the fennel seeds, turmeric, chili flakes, salt and pepper, and place the tray in the oven for 50 minutes to an hour.

- Once all the tomatoes, onions and garlic have roasted, remove the garlic cloves and put to one side. Place all the tomatoes and onions to a food processor or blender. Now to add the garlic into this, you only want the roasted clove not the casing, so squish the center out of the garlic clove and discard the casing.

- Add the rice malt syrup, lemon juice and basil, into the food processor and blitz this up to a relatively smooth sauce consistency. How smooth is up to you!

- Keep the sauce in an airtight jar in the fridge, and it will last up to a week.

Let me know how you go if you do try this out yourselves, or post a picture on instagram with the hashtag #cinnamoncourtney so I can see all of your recreations!

'My life works beautifully' - Louise L. Hay

Chocolate Zucchini Birthday Cake

            This week was my partner's birthday, so I decided what a perfect opportunity to break out my cake baking skills. I normally prefer to bake small things, like muffins, cookies or slices, because I feel like I understand how they react and bake in the oven.

I always get a little scared when I’m baking a cake that the middle will just not cook but I’ll burn the outside! This fear comes from a very bad run with trying to recreate a healthy banana bread recipe, but I have recently solved that dilemma so this should be a piece of cake! (Pun intended)

            The first thing I knew I wanted to have in this birthday cake was a chocolate flavour. Simply because I know he’ll love that, but from there I had so many ideas of what else I wanted to add in, that I just couldn’t decide. In the end I chose to use the beautiful zucchinis that had grown from his sisters vegetable garden. These add in a sneak hit of vegetable goodness, but will also help to add an awesome texture to the cake and stop it from becoming dry.

Zucchini & Chocolate Birthday Cake

Plant based - Gluten Free - Dairy Free

Makes: 1 cake, 8- 10 serves

Time: prep- 15 minutes

Cooking- 30 minutes

Ingredients:

- 1 1/3 cup almond meal

- 1 cup buckwheat flour

- 1 tsp baking powder

- 1 tsp baking soda

- ½ cup cacao or carob

- ½ tsp cinnamon

- ¼ tsp nutmeg

- Pinch of Himalayan pink salt

- 2 flax eggs (1 egg= 1 tbsp flaxseed meal + 3 tbsp water)

- ½ cup coconut oil, melted

- ½ cup rice malt syrup

- 1/3 cup almond milk

- 2 medium zucchini, grated

Chocolate Peanut Butter Icing (optional):

-2 tbsp cacao powder or carob powder

-2 tbsp rice malt syrup

-4 tbsp coconut oil, melted

-2 tbsp natural peanut butter (could swap for any nut or seed butter)

Method:

- Preheat your oven to 170C, and lightly grease a medium cake tin with coconut oil.

- Grate the zucchini and squeeze as much of the liquid from it as you can, either with a muslin/cheese cloth or through a sieve.

- Combine all the wet ingredients together in one bowl and all the dry ingredients together in another. Then mix them both mixtures together; making sure that it is all well combined.

- Transfer the mixture into your cake tin and pop it in the oven. Cook the cake for 30 minutes or until a skewer comes out clean.

- Allow it to cool in the tin for 10 to 15 minutes, before turning it out into a wire rack to cool.

- While the cake is cooling you can put together the chocolate topping. Place all of the ingredients into a bowl and stir until combined. Once the cake has cooled slightly pour the topping over the top of the cake, the topping smoothes out better when the cake is still a little warm. You could add extra toppings here, like coconut chips, chopped nuts or fresh berries.

- I recommend keeping this in an airtight container in the fridge, but I also think it tastes a lot better when its at room temperature. So take the out of the fridge a little while before serving.

Let me know how you go if you do try this out yourselves, or post a picture on instagram with the hashtag #cinnamoncourtney so I can see all of your recreations!

‘I don’t make assumptions’ – Don Miguel Ruiz