Our take on Moroccan pilaff

As you may have been able to see I am struggling to find the time to blog much at the moment. Little Miss is lots of fun at the moment so we are constantly on the go. We have got to the stage where she eats pretty much everything so dinners are just what us adults fancy. One of my New Years resolutions is to meal plan and to try at least one new recipe a week. So far we have had 2 weeks of meal planning. Not only has it really saved us money on our shopping (this weeks was half our average shop!!) but it also meant that we didn't have to rush out to buy some ingredients for a new recipe (or any recipe for that matter).

For today we had planned in a Moroccan pilaff. I never follow recipes to the letter and often like to add more veg or more variety of veg to dishes which is what I did to this one as it only had carrots. It also wanted almonds in but because Little Miss isn't at the whole nut stage I skipped that part.

Here is the recipe I used. It made enough for two large adult potions, a child portion and 2.5 lunch portions for tomorrow too.

Ingredients:

2 medium onions, chopped

4 medium carrots, chopped (circles/semi-circles)

1 medium courgette, chopped to same size as the carrots

1/3 butternut squash, peeled and chopped to the same size again

1.5 tsp cinnamon

Some olive oil for frying

300g long grain rice, rinsed

A couple of handfuls of raisins/sultanas

A couple of handfuls of dried apricots, cut in half

Method:

1. Preheat the oven to 190 degrees Celsius.

2. Fry the onions in the oil and cinnamon for a few minutes

3. Add the other vegetables and cook for a further 5 or so minutes

4. Add the rice, raisins and apricots and stir to coat in oil

5. Put everything into a casserole dish but only coming up halfway. I had to use two! It helps if the dish(es) have lids.

6. Pour on 1 litre 125 ml of boiling water (from the kettle) over the mixture.

7. Cover with the lid or some foil and cook in the oven for around 45 minutes when the water should be absorbed and the rice should be cooked.

And voila! There you go. For the adults we did find we wanted to add some salt at the table.

My boyfriend always thinks he doesn't like fruit in savoury dishes but he did really enjoy this and so did Little Miss. The rice was nice and sticky for her to pick up some with her fingers or to feed herself with a spoon.

JULES XOXO

Vegetable fritters

I have been trying to do some sort of meal planning this week so have been trawling the Internet for ideas for some nice recipes suitable for all of us. Of course most baby-led weaning websites aren't vegan but there quite a few vegetarian recipes out there. I saw one for butternut squash and sweetcorn pancakes which sounded really good for finger food. I hadn't really considered savoury pancakes like that before.

If you've seen pancake recipes before or cooked non-vegan pancakes you'll know thy then to have egg and milk in. Obviously you can substitute both of these relatively easily (non-dairy milk for the cows milk and flaxseed/banana/egg replacers etc) but I decided to make more of a dense fritter style instead. To be honest this was really because I didn't have any suitable egg replacers in!

Little Miss' daddy doesn't really like sweetcorn much and I only like the kind straight from the cob so I used courgette (zucchini) instead.

Ingredients

100g butternut squash

100g courgette

150g flour (all purpose)

Non-dairy milk (rice milk isn't recommended for babies)

Some vegetable/sunflower/olive oil

Method

Steam the vegetables until soft  (I used a metal sieve over a boiling pan of water with a lid  on top. No fancy steamers here!). 

Mash together with the flour.

Add non-dairy milk until a thick batter forms (still sticks to the spoon but is quite gloopy).

Heat up some oil in a frying pan. About 2 tablespoons will probably do.

Fry spoonfuls spread into small discs (ours were about 4cm across). They will probably need just a few minutes each side until they are golden brown.

Let them cool down on some kitchen roll to absorb some of the excess oil.

This made about 12 small fritters. We each had 4 each (LM didn't consume all 4 but 4 were needed for the obligatory "throw some on the floor" and "mash some on my head" purposes". LM's daddy and I had some extra vegetables and sweet chilli sauce with ours.

These went down a storm with everyone and were perfect for a weekend lunch all together. They would work with so many other vegetables so give them a go and tell me how yours went!

JULES XOXO