Potato Salad with Greens

This super easy salad recipe can be made as a side dish or you can just have it on its own for lunch! Potato is not the healthiest thing to eat because it’s firstly high in carbs. (see the link for more info!) Second, if you have diabetes,  hypoglycemia or insulin resistance you should definitely avoid eating potato products or dishes.  However, if you have any of these issues you can still eat potato salad because it doesn’t affect you as bad when it’s cold. It only causes your blood sugar to increase a lot when it’s still hot. Anyway! Here is the recipe:

All ingredients are given without measurements because it depends on how much you want to make, but for example if you would use 4 medium size potatoes, you would also use half bunch of mint, parsley and spring onions with 1 + 1/2 lemon juice. Spices are totally optional, I usually add them while tasting.

Ingredients: 

• Potatoes
• Fresh mint
• Fresh parsley
• Fresh spring onions
• Red onions
• Ground chili pepper
• Lemon juice
• Olive oil
• Salt and black pepper to taste
• A tiny bit of cumin -1/2 tsp- is optional, I personally super like it but my mum never uses it 🙂

Remove potatoes’ skin first and boil them until they get softer. If you over-boil though, they will become really soft like mashed potatoes, we don’t want that. Chop them into small cubes. Thinly slice the greens  and red onions, mix them all together with chopped potatoes. Add the spices and lemon juice in the end while tasting. It really is a matter of taste, I like it sour and spicy. Easy-peasy squeeze lemons!

Mashed Cauliflower Purée & Cajun Seasoned Chicken

I have gotten this idea of mashed cauliflower purée from Pinterest and couldn’t wait  for long to make it! First of all, great healthier alternative for mashed potatoes and I’m sure broccoli would replace it really good as well.

Ingredients:

• 1 cauliflower 
• Extra virgin olive oil 
• Dry chives 
• Dry parsley 
• Salt and black pepper to taste
• Cumin
• Chicken thighs 
• Cajun seasoning 
• Dry thyme

Cut cauliflower into small pieces and boil  for 20-25 minutes until it gets tender. Then mix it with 1 tbsp olive oil, 1/4 of the water that you boiled the cauliflower. Blend the mixture for a couple minutes. Then add -as much as you want- dry parsley and chives, finally add salt and black pepper to taste. Blend more until it gets smoother. Add 1 tbsp cumin, then taste it, you might want to add some more. I couldn’t make it but I thought that a clove of garlic (grated) would have been super good in the mixture. 🙂

Cajun chicken: it is just chicken thighs seasoned with

cajun seasoning, dry thyme, salt and pepper to taste and some olive oil

fried into a pan! Easy peasy.

Sunday Breakfast: smoked salmon, eggs, parsley

Scrambled egg & smoked salmon on bagel is one of the classic recipes of all time! It’s even more delicious with little tips!

Use lemon flavoured olive oil!

Mix salt and freshly ground black pepper with olive oil and spread onto toasted bagels with a brush, then place semi-fried (a bit runny) eggs and smoked salmon on top.

Sprinkle some dry parsley on top! You may want to use fresh parsley as well, both work quite good!

Ultimate Green Salad

I used to hate eating salads, thinking that they are not good enough to have as a meal or just not really tasty at all. This was the situation until I discovered the pomegranate sauce as a salad dressing though 🙂 It’s the best! It’s 10000 times better than creamy and oily kind of salad dressings that people tend to use for their salad therefore turning the salad into something, however tastier, less healthy. Obviously the only reason to eat a salad is not because it’s really good for you, but it’s true that it prevents you from eating way more than you need because it is super filling. The ultimate green salad is the recipe which made me get used to eat salad a lot more, and it’s not a fancy recipe at all. It basically takes less than 5 minutes to prepare.

Ingredients: 

• Mixed leaf salad (best to have tiny bit of everything)
• Feta cheese 
• Cucumber 
• Olive oil 
• Pomegranate sauce
• Mixed herbs

Place the salad leaves into a bowl, slice the cucumber thinly (or whatever way you’d like) and add some feta cheese (you don’t need to chop but it looks nice if you’d make little cubes). After sprinkling some mixed herbs finally add only 1 or 2 tbsp olive oil and pomegranate sauce as much as you like. If it’s your first time, taste it first because it’s a strong flavour that some people might not like to be honest. 

Green Pasta

I’ve been waiting to share this recipe for so long! My dear friend Naaman made a cooking video for this recipe!  The ingredients are on the video but here is a list:

• Pasta
• Spinach
• Courgette
• A couple cloves of Garlic
• Black olives
• Pine Nuts
• Salt & Black Pepper
• Olive Oil
• Homemade Green Pesto

Following Jamie Oliver’s recipe, I made my homemade green pesto that you can find on Food Station!

Enjoy!

Kısır (Bulgur Salad)

After the long Valentine’s weekend, all that cakes, chocolates and sweets all around, it’s time to go back to the healthy eating routine. Not only it is really filling, Kisir (that’s how we call it in Turkish) i.e bulgur salad doesn’t involve much of an effort to be honest, so it was perfect for a lazy day as well 🙂

What you need: 

• 2 cup of Fine bulgur
• 1/2 cup of Lemon juice
• 1 bunch mint
• 1 bunch of fresh dill
• 1 bunch of parsley
• 1 bunch of spring onions
• 1 bunch of lettuce (preferably not crispy ones)
• 1 tbsp tomato puree 
• 1 tbsp red pepper puree 
• 1/2 cup of olive oil 
• Salt 
• Ground black pepper
• a couple pinches of cumin 
• Ground chili peppers (only if you would like it spicy though)
• Sliced cucumber (optional as well but it’s nice!)

First mix the bulgur with 1/2 cup of boiled water and leave it until it absorbs all the water. Aside, chop all the green stuff really thin. Mix the tomato puree and red pepper puree with the bulgur then add chopped greens and lemon juice. Finally add salt, pepper and cumin. Stir them all and it’s ready!

Cheesy Meatballs

I am super keen on trying as many different stuff as I can. It not only helps to waste the least amount of ingredients if you accidently make an unreasonable amount of something. I sometimes have this problem when preparing the filling. So this recipe is made out of the rest of my stuffed peppers filling, -see the previous post 🙂 – , I mixed 2 eggs with the filling from last night and fried them really gently because there’s no bread in the filling but bulgur wheat which makes them really crumbly!

When they are nearly done, sprinkle some grated cheddar on top of the meatballs and you can dress them up with parsley.