Salaric Cooking

Becca’s Chocolatey Orange and Cointreau Mousse [wheat, dairy and egg free!]

I was craving something sweet and chocolately but didn’t have any pudding so i kind of adapted and merged two recipes together and discovered a gorgeous rich chocoalte mousse.  It is also wheat and dairy free.

Ingredients  6oz soya butter 6oz icing sugar 2oz cocoa [though i used ~4 oz cocoa] Juice of one orange [or 1 cup of orange juice] 1 shot (~30 ml) Cointreau

• use a table spoon to mash the soya butter into the icing sugar.  Keep stiring untill you get “butter creme” of smooth consistancy
• Stir in the cocoa a fraction at a time.  Taste the chocolate mouss and keep adding cocoa untill you have a flavour that you like
• Stir in the orange juice and Cointreau.
• Taste the mousse add a little more cocoa or icing sugar if you want.

Tips This mousse is great served with fresh strawberries and/or rasberries.  It can be quite rich so don’t induldge too much!!!

Food for Free is the title of one of the most useful books I have come across its by Richard Mabey and without it I would never have attempted half my recipes – The book goes through the plants, fungi and shell fish that can be found in the UK. It tells you a bit about their history, where they like to be found, how to identify them and often there is a little recipe or tip on what you can substitute it for.

It dates from the 1970’s and when I bought a copy I was informed it was out of print but I have recently seen a brand new version of it in the book shops!

Yellow Split peas soaked as the instructions on the packet suggested poured out the water zapped them in the blender till pulped Add spices to taste: crushed garlic chillis cumin seeds corriander powder

Finely chop fresh lovage and add to the mix – warning this can over power things so you might need to experiement a bit to get the taste you want!

Mixed it all together well formed it inot little cakes about 5 cm across Fry in veggi oil until crisp

I discovered a new food that was YUMMY YUMMY YUMMY last week – me and Alaric were taken to Goldersgreen for dinner and there we discovered the delight of flaffles in a sort of cross between a pitta bread and tortia with some with some really nice humous and other sort of aubagine dip thing.

So yesturday imagine my joy when looking for food for me an Jean I come across a chickpea flaffle, in a medaterrian style flatebread in the first I came across that I could get into easily with the pushchiar (Happened to be a Starbucks so things werent exactly cheap!). Now I knew it wouldn’t be as good but I was severlly disappointed with it so now I’m thinking I have two options – a) hunt around for the best flaffle there is or… b) find out how to make them myself and get good at it? Oh well looks like it’ll be about ten yrs before I get the yummy again 🙁

Still the flaffle tasted very familiar to me which has been puzzling me since I first tasted (Well actually since the second time I tasted it as the first time I’d accidently got Alarics and therefore could taste nothing but chillis!). I think it is a taste remaniscant of something that my nan used to make but I really don’t have a clue.

I’m also awear that I have probably spelt stuff wrong as I’m running on phonetics here!

Origonally taken from my personal blog.