Easy paleo chocolate sponge-cake

Coffee & cake on the balcony (a.k.a. heaven)

Every now and then there are occassions when I feel like I am a very spoiled girlfriend, whose life can’t get any better. I present you one of those occassions. This was every bit as good as it looks in the picture. The pic was taken on a bright Sunday morning out on my balcony. The cake was made (and was half eaten 😛 ) the previous evening though, which gives extra awesomeness points to this I think – I mean, waking up to leftover cake in the fridge? 🙂
Before I tell you all there is to know about the sponge-cake, I would like to dedicate a few thoughts to the coffee as well. I became a coffee drinker when I started working after university, and it is now a part of my everyday routine. Miki became a coffee drinker a few months into our relationship. 😀 And we fit it nicely into our paleo diet, because we have it either with coconut milk, coconut cream, almond milk or hazelnut milk, and sweeten it with erythritol. Sometimes a bit of vanilla also makes its way into the cups. 🙂

This wasn’t the first (or, hopefully, the last) time Miki made me sponge-cake, but it was definitely the first time that he put so much strawberry on top. 😀 He has a standard, basic recipe for the cake and of course the toppings can be varied in endless ways.

Savoury muffins with cheese & veggies

After posting about sweet muffins last time, here are some savoury ones as well. 🙂 These are cheese & veggie muffins 2.0, Miki had made them once before and they had been a big success, so they had to be prepared again. Last time we had ham with them instead of salami. The ham version was also yummy, however, this time we paid more attention to presentation, too, so the dish has become blogpost-worthy. 😛 Once you get into gastro-blogging, you realise how much presentation matters…

These do not require a whole lot of effort, but they are still slightly more complex than having a cold-cut dinner. All right, on to the recipe:

For the muffins (~10 medium sized ones)

Quick muffins with apricot jam

I have owed you this recipe since I posted the one for the pork loin last time. Truth be told, we had these at the same time, but it would have been too much for a single post. It seems that there was a lot of creative energy in the kitchen that evening. 🙂 Or, in other words, Miki couldn’t live with the idea that it would only be me who cooks, so he had to contribute something to the dinner other than the fried egg-face with the salad hair. Not that I’m complaining, these muffins were pretty awesome… ❤ Therefore, they’re blogpost worthy, but also because they are simple, you can pretty much use any fruit or paleo flour for them, and you can get creative with the jam. 😛

This is what Miki actually used to make them:

Pork loin with mushroom & tomatoes

The other day something entirely unexpected happened: I (yes, me, Zsófi) made something that managed to get a ton of compliments from the Master Chef himself, what is more, he insisted that I turn it into a blogpost. I think the last time I made something this successful the blog had not yet existed, so I must grab this rare opportunity and give you the recipe for this dish of pork loin slices. The amount I made serves two pretty well if you are average people, but if one of you is an SFG instructor after his workout, I suggest making a larger amount. 🙂

Cold cut dinner, starring smoked African catfish

After two nearly successful attempts at destroying my kitchen this week (namely a frozen whole duck with its intestines stuck inside in it in a plastic bag, and the aftermath of frying the duck in my oven and spilling a generous amount of fat in there), we didn’t have much enthusiasm left on Thursday to cook again. Luckily this never has to mean ordering pizza or starving to death, especially when you’ve had your fourth workout of the week (we both did) and have no desire whatsoever to stuff your body with junk. So just like in the case of making brunch, we already had some of the ingredients sitting around in the fridge, and just quickly stopped by Tesco to add a couple more things. You may notice that there are muffins in the picture though, so yeah, I did do a bit of messing around in the kitchen earlier during the day, only to cure my sadness caused by having to wait too long for a response concerning a job. It worked, and I assure you that after finishing this dinner, there was not an ounce of sadness left in either Miki or me. Umm, okay, we had a glass of white wine, too. 😛

Obviously you can put together a cold cut dinner in endless ways, but just for the sake of a proper blogpost, I’ll list everything that we had here. There were:

Chocolate & banana pancakes

If you liked our recipe for the chocolate oatmeal breakfast I posted a few weeks ago, we have a reason to believe that this following one might be a winner, too.

Honestly, who doesn’t love pancakes? They are one of the best ways (in terms of food) to say ‘I love you’ in the morning, either if you are with your significant other, or if you just make them for yourself – seriously, self-love is just as important! 😛

In our Hungarian cuisine we have crêpe-style pancakes. As you can see, the ones in this recipe resemble the North American version much more. Anyways, it is great that if you follow the paleo diet, you do not need to give up your love for pancakes. Generally, paleo isn’t about giving up; you can enjoy your food just as much (or actually, much more!), however, with certain dishes you should substitute some of the ingredients with healthy ones in order to keep making them.

This is just one of the versions of paleo pancakes we have made, and to be honest, all of them have been delicious. I wouldn’t be surprised if more popped up here on the blog in the future, but for now, I present you the macadamia nut flour version.

Here are the ingredients that will give you a generous amount for 2 people.

Braised red cabbage with roasted chicken thighs

Let me share with you the many reasons why Miki and I are fond of this dish, other than the fact that it tastes great. It also has a beautiful colour, and it is actually quite traditional in Hungarian cuisine to make this, yet it fits into the paleo diet. Miki also told me that back when he first started shifting to this diet, this was the first food he prepared. It goes very well with almost any roasted meat, but it is especially delicious with duck. This time we had chicken with it though, which is more of a budget option. 🙂
Another fun fact about red cabbage is that it can be used to make a pH indicator solution, to test acidity. Cooking with a man trained in chemistry can sometimes be a bit like sitting in a science class. 😛 However I still think it’s best if I tell you the ingredients for the dish. Here they are:

Heart-warming brunch ideas for cold and lazy days…or for any day really :)

Brunch on a sunny, happy day^^

Oh those lazy mornings, when you don’t ever seem to be able to get out of bed, and you just roll around, for just ten more minutes, then five more…then another five. 🙂 And then eventually noon approaches, and you start to get hungry. Time for a bite or two. Let’s throw some brunch together from whatever you can find in the fridge.

Miki and I are certainly guilty of lazing around like this on multiple occasions, but we are big fans of having brunch, plus we can also blog about it, so it’s kind of a win-win situation. 🙂

For this one you can see in the picture, we used:

Marine fish stew

Do you guys like to watch any cooking TV channels? To be honest, neither Miki nor I have a television and we don’t miss it at all, but when Miki goes home to his parents’ house he still enjoys watching a few things, for example – what a surprise – a cooking channel called TV Paprika. 🙂 On one of these occassions he saw a recipe by the Two Greedy Italians that he liked and that provided inspiration for the one I am going to tell you about in this post. We’re really keen on fish for a number of reasons. The most obvious is that it is super healthy for you and everyone should have it often – if we ever become millionaires, we’ll surely eat fish multiple times each week. 😛 And the other, perhaps less obvious reason is that Miki is from the city of Baja where people take a lot of pride in their fish soup. Now a lot could be said about the fish soup of Baja, but one thing is for sure – their definition of a fish soup is a lot different from the Italian version. In our terms, the soup they made on tv is more like a stew, hence the title of the post.

@ the Fishmonger

With Hungary being a landlocked country, marine fish can sometimes be hard to get hold of and it is pricey as well. Not very far from Budapest, in Budaörs, there is a fish market we had heard a lot about before, it’s called The Fishmonger. So to make this recipe, we decided to check it out. Now I actually must put the word “market” in quotation marks because it turned out to be just a shop that sells some fresh marine fish and some ingredients that can supplement your fish dishes in the kitchen. It wasn’t less expensive to buy there, either, but we liked the concept that there is also a fish snack bar (Dokk Büfé) to have a bite and try what they’re selling.
No matter the price, we got everything we wanted, and the shopkeeper kindly even showed us how to clean and prepare the squids.

I warn you, this is going to be one messy recipe, and when I think of the state of my kitchen after the cooking process, somehow the word ‘massacre’ keeps popping into my mind. But it is a worthy sacrifice for what you get at the end. Should you decide to go destroy your kitchen, too, here is what you’ll need – this amount serves four:

The funeral repass of the pig and of the year 2013

So what do two foodies do on New Year’s Eve? Right, they cook and they eat. We also had a couple of friends over and played an epic game of Munchkin while waiting for the precious meat to roast. Now I must tell you a couple of things about the meat we had, not just because we’re meat lovers but also because there are some interesting traditions here in Hungary during wintertime and also connected to New Year’s.
November and December are the months when the traditional pig slaughters happen at families living in the country – both of our families are no exception to this, my uncle even helps out as a butcher very often. This time, we were reaping the benefits of a pig slaughter at Miki’s family. The feast following the slaughter is called a ‘tor‘ in Hungarian, which basically means a funeral repass for the animal that sacrificed its life for us (not that it had another choice, but still). The other thing I must mention is some of the superstitions connected to the food you should eat when entering the new year. Poultry should be avoided because those fowls will scratch away your good luck, but on the contrary, four-legged animals like the pig will most definitely root up some good luck. 🙂 Eating lentils is also very common as it represents having a ton of money in the new year, but us paleo eaters would rather be penniless than have it.