Recipe books: the theory of four

Starting with my hypothesis that I only ever adopt four recipes out of a cookbook I downloaded Deliciously Ella Awesome Ingredients and later Deliciously Ella Every Day. This gave me a total of at least 200 new recipes. I immediately fell in love with the philosophy of Deliciously Ella: plant-based, lactose-free, gluten-free, refined sugar free – I called it the everything-free vegan eating regime or the date diet. It does use a lot of nuts – and dates.

I started with snacks and this was a good idea. We’d previously developed a pretty hard-core chocolate habit. Some weeks we’d get through a bar of Lindt dark chocolate with salted caramel per day. That’s over ten euros a week, compared with €1.49 for 250g of dates (which makes enough ‘energy bites’ for one each per day, though of course we eat a lot more than that…).

So, I started with the energy bites (or power balls, I call them). Across the two books there are four variations and you can find more on the website. I also read through the suggestions for breakfast, though I’ve already tried making smoothies and found it too expensive, so I’ll be sticking to Innocent when I can get hold of them, or juice. Bircher muesli is on my list of things to try making. If I could get OH onto it that would be both a saving over the imported Weetabix and healthier. I’m currently eating a version of a granola bar, but that’s not an Ella recipe, I found it on the Minimalist Baker website.

Apart from the energy bites one of the most successful treats has been the Raw Chocolate Brownies made with just three ingredients. I’ve been making a lot of these as I accidentally ordered a whole kilo of organic cacao. It’s tempting to keep making sweet treats, especially when there are so many great recipes, but my original objective was to collect some more ‘main course’ recipes.

I’d bought some quinoa on the last trip to Carrefour which was a bit cheaper at €2 compared with the exorbitant bio quinoa procured earlier in the year. It’s trickier to cook than couscous, and we’d not been terribly successful with it so far. However, DE has some great tips for cooking flavoursome quinoa (such a thing does exist). Both Spicy Quinoa and Lemon Quinoa have been added to the repertoire.

The first ‘big meal’ I made was Pad Thai. I used all the same ingredients as the recipes, just tweaked it a little by adding a bit of ginger as I’d got some to use up and of course, some chillies, as we love chillies. My method was a little different though, as I stir fried the veg rather than serving it raw, and warmed the Pad Thai sauce through. It was a fantastic flavour and so easy to make, just throw everything in the food processor. I’ve made it a couple of times since and it’s made its way onto the permanent list. I’d now got to eight recipes out of two books , so my theory of four hypothesis was proving to be correct. Time to find some more inspiration.

Just reading through generally I’ve picked up some good ideas about flavouring, one area where vegan food can get a bad reputation for blandness. I’ve now made two Ella salts – chilli salt and herb salt, which have lifted some of our regular dishes to a new level. After the success of the sweet treats I was looking for something savoury as our chocolate habit seemed to have been replaced by a pre-prandial apero and a bag of supermarket chilli tortilla chips. First, I tried the Chilli and Tamari trail mix, tweaking the recipe slightly by adding seeds and doubling the spices. My photo looks almost professional and they taste as good as they look. Spicy chickpeas were another winner too.

Spicy trail mix

I have not yet progressed beyond twelve recipes, although I have beaten my prediction. Whilst I might not have adopted as many recipes as I was aiming for, what I particularly like about both books is the philosophy and Ella’s enthusiasm , which shines through. The books are written in a very bloggy style. Another plus point is how easy the recipes are to make. Most can be made in one pan or bowl, or just by throwing everything into the food processor. Once you’ve stocked up on the basic nuts, seeds and butters there are no unusual ingredients, and the preparation time is rarely more than half an hour. So, overall I’m very pleased with both books. They were worth it just for the energy balls recipes alone. The only thing I have noted is that I wouldn’t buy a cookery book on Kindle again as I miss the colour photos, being able to leaf through, and I tended to write the recipe out in my notebook rather than have the Kindle on the worktop. So, even if I didn’t adopt as many recipes as I planned, the books and the philosophy behind them have certainly provided inspiration.

My Pad Thai