Polenta slices with tomato sauce and fresh vegetables

You may know polenta mainly as a creamy, hot side dish served with italian food, but polenta is much more versatile than that. It gets quite firm when it cools down, so you can easily cut it in shapes and use it as a gluten-free base for hearty slices, veggie burgers and the like. This recipe uses this quality of polenta to make hearty, pizza-like slices that you can eather serve hot or cold. They are perfect for taking to uni or work with you, and you can use whatever vegetable you have at hand for the topping.

Creamy curry leek soup with apples

Though we are officially approaching summer time, the weather does quite a good job in ignoring this. I am still bundled up in my winter clothes when I’m heading out for my morning run, and the evenings are still way to cold for my liking. Luckily, if you’re not getting enough warmth from the sun, you can easily get some spring feelings with a fresh and spicy soup! The heartyness of leek makes a perfect combination with fresh, sourly apples, and the spicy flavours of curry are truly the icing on the cake of this soup. I used ‘light’ soy cream in this recipe to make it vegan, though you can use any kind of plant (or dairy if you’re non-vegan) cream you like.

Sushi course part 3: Blanched spinach salad with sesame dressing

And here we go again with my little sushi course! This time though, I’m not going to show you another way for making sushi rolls, but a tasty side dish. At first sight this salad might seem a little blant since it’s basically just spinach with a sesame-soy dressing, but the tahini really makes this a special treat! You can use fresh or frozen spinach for this – I personally prefer to use fresh spinach, though since you will blanche it anyway, the frozen one won’t make such a big difference. Just make sure the leaves aren’t chopped to finely, or you will have a hard time trying to eat this with chopsticks!

Savoury chickpea muffins with harissa

I’ve decided to take a little break from my sushi course (though I promise to continue it!) in favour of some home-baking. Savoury muffings (like these cornbread muffins with walnuts and sage I’ve posted before) are one of my favourites treats from the oven – they are easy and fast to make, perfect for a packed lunch and keep well in the freezer, so don’t be afraid of making a big batch ahead. These chickpea muffins where inspired by me stumbling upon a glas of harissa in the pantry and thinking about what to use it for. And since I had just run out of savoury muffins… I use dried chickpeas for this recipe, though if you want to save some time you can use canned ones instead – just remember they’re way more expensive! 

Sushi course part 2: Inside-out rolls with white rice

So, I hope you all mastered part one of my little sushi course and are now experts in making maki rolls? Then it’s now time for a new challenge: inside-out rolls! These are a little more difficult to make (though we will use some kitchen foil to make it easier), so if you want to give them a go, maybe it’s best if you give the maki rolls a try first for practice. Since we need the rice to be more sticky than for the makis, I recommend using white rice for these. You can use whatever vegetable you like for the filling, I used ball pepper, carot, cucumber and beet root for the ones pictures above.

Sushi course part 1: Basic maki rolls with brown rice

I’m quite into sushi at the moment, and since eating take out all the time isn’t something I’m very fond of, I figured it couldn’t be to hard to make sushi myself. Turns out, it really isn’t! These maki rolls are filled with plain rice and a basic vegetable filling – I used cucumber and red ball pepper – though you can use whatever you like of course. There are much easier to make than inside-out rolls or other kinds, so I figured to start my little sushi course with these ones. I used brown rice for this, it’s slightly less sticky than white rice but works fine as a filling. I wouldn’t recommend using it for other types of sushi though, especially if you just start to make it on your own.

Apple beet root salad with vegan horseradish dressing

Winter is a quite hard season for salad lovers, since you don’t have such a big choice of vegetables as in the warmer seasons. Root vegetables however have their main season during winter, so feel free to use them for a tasty salad! This one combines slightly sweet beet roots with crunchy, sourish apples and a spicy horseradish dressing – perfect for  a quick lunch or a no fuss dinner.  If you want to take this to uni, I recommend carrying the dressing in a extra bottle to keep the salad fresh and crunchy.