Oat bread!

Since 2009, i stopped eating simple carbs for about 6 months, i lost around 18kg. After that i thought that if i control my calorie intake while still eating carbs ( bread, rice, pasta), id still loss weight, but that didn't happen. I was working out 1 hr a day but that didn't help.

Then i switched to whole grains, and whole grains i make at home, to make sure its whole grain. But that as well didnt help me. I gained few pounds. So i made the hard decision and decided to stop eating bread and rice.

It was a very hard decision since i am not a very big on meat and bread is a stable for me. 
As everyone knows, once carbs are removed we end up with salads and beans only. I don't mind beans at all, but you always get that craving for bread.

I experimented alot with bread and i came down to few conclusions. Trying to make bread from oats only is very difficult and its acceptable for that moment only and later on its just not the same. Making bread loaf with oats only isnt a good idea.

So i thought instead of making it a loaf, id make flat bread and since i am arabic, flat bread is our favorite kind of bread. However, the struggle was how to make it from oats only. It was difficult because oats cant hold together properly and just disintegrate right after u knead the dough. The best idea was to add some sort of flour that would hold it together.

So any kind of a very fine flour would help the oat stay together. chickpea flour is a very good example, they would help the oats stay together and it has a very unique taste to it. Then we have rice flour, rice flour gets quite sticky after you add water to it so it might be slightly difficult to use. Coconut flour is another example.

I used normal flour as i couldnt get my hands on any of these.

Ingredients:

• 200g oats ( i used rolled oats, you can use oat flour)
• 100g all purpose flour ( better to be at least replaced by whole wheat flour)
•  1/4 tsp salt
• 1/4 tsp sugar
• 
  
• 1 pack of dried yeast.
• 300ml lukewarm water

Optional:

• You can add flax seeds and any nuts you would like to add.

Steps:

• Put the yeast, sugar,salt half of the water and half of the oats and the flour. The water shouldnt be hot. Mix them together, cover them and set them aside. The point is, to fast activate the yeast.
• After 15mins, the mix would have bubbled and thats due to the yeast activation producing CO2.
• Add the rest of oats and flour and knead them well.
• Cover it and let it rise. It wont rise as normal bread, but it would increase in size.
• You can let them rise over night, but you can cook them after 3hrs of rest.
• After that, knead them, to get rid of any bubbles.

It would look like this.

You can notice the oats blended with that flour.

Add a bit of flour before shaping them.














Like chapati, cook them at slightly high heat.

Mini Kebabs with tomato salsa. "

I think i already didn't keep my promise by posting every week. So I decided to write this post as the whether started to become more pleasant. 

 Most of my cooking is according to what is in the fridge and the pantry. Me and my husband live with my in laws  first because they have a big house that fit us all and second my husband is in his last year of architecture college. Of course I cant wait to move out for one reason and one reason only and that is having my own kitchen.

The reason why I mentioned all of the above was, every dish i make depends on whats available and whats my mother in law has bought. So this dish was made because we had minced meet in the fridge.

We didn't have yogurt to make a sauce so i decided to make salsa, but to be honest, it tasted so much better because the salsa was refreshing.

here we go!

Ingredients: 
for the meat and the marinade:

• 500g of minced meat with around 20% fat percentage. 
• one red onion
• one tomato
• parsley
• ground black pepper
• ground cumin
• ground cardamom
• ground cinnamon
• ground nutmeg
• ground red chilly 
• 3 clove of garlic
• salt to taste

for the chapti (a form of flat bread):

• 250g of flour
• 150ml lukewarm water
• pinch of salt

for the salsa:

• one medium sizetomatoa
• one medium size red onion
• one medium size cucumber
• juice of one lemon
• pinch of salt.

Steps:

• First we marinade the meat  by cutting the onion and tomato. They have to be as small as possible. When you cut the tomato, remove the seeds because they create moisture.
• Some people use the food processor  for that but i like cutting it myself because i dont want the onion and tomato to be minced.
• Mince the garlic.
• Add all the spices, minced garlic, copped onion and tomato ( the tomato give the kebabs a sweet taste to them)
• Mix the meat well and then leave it to marinade for at least 8hrs, the longer the marinade, the better.
• This is the meat after 24hrs.

• Then shape the meat like sausages, they are called kebabs when they are in that shape.

• Grill the kebabs. Preferably on a fire grill.

Now for the chapati.

• Mix the flour and salt. Add half of the water and mix. Try to incorporate the flour and water and knead the flour between your fingers.
• Adding too much water, will make the dough very moist and thats not what we want.
• Adding too much flour, will make the dough very dense and harder to shape.
• Try to make the dough soft but it  shouldnt be sticky.

• Leave the dough to rest for 15mins.
• Shape the dough like flat bread. If the bread is sticky, add a bit of  flour, but try not to add too much, because that will make the bread very dry when you cook it.

Grill the bread on slightly high heat because  bread cooks fast.

Few chapati














Now to assemble the sandwich.

My take on Truffles.

Its quite nerve racking when  you start doing anything new. I still remember my first day in the hospital doing my residency, I was quite nervous meeting new people. Someone commented saying it's like your first day at school.

Thats how I am feeling right now, though I am not actually meeting someone in person it's still as nerve racking or even more.

So I am finally starting this blog after seriously thinking about it and also after my husband kept nagging on me to open  it. So I thought I might as well give it a shot and see where this goes.
I have a huge passion for cooking, even though I'm not foodie I love cooking. Sometimes when I feel troubled with my own career ( in case you didn't figure it out yet from the blog title, I am a doctor) I think of completely giving up on it and just finding a career in cooking, but I guess my pride will never let me do that.

I'm just hoping to be very consistent and committed to this blog and make time at least once a week to post a recipe of mine.

I don't want to make my first post long, but you will get to know me and my cooking orientation along the way.

The story of this recipe is quite interesting, I love oats and anything to do with them. I am used to making them a certain way but I was really getting bored with it, so 3 days ago, I just started experimenting and I ended up with this recipe.

Here we go!



Ingredients:

• 1 cup of oats ( you can add more, depending on how much you would like)
• 1/2 cup brown sugar ( you can use normal sugar or even honey)
• 50g of butter
• 300ml milk (preferably full fat)
• handful of shredded almonds
• 100g of toasted shredded coconut.
• 30g of chopped up chocolate ( you can use unsweetened powder cocoa)

Optional:

• you can use anything to coat the macroons with
• you can also use a whole almond by placing it in the center of the macroons.
• you can add dried fruits

Method: 

1. First, you put the oats on a pan and put it on medium heat. The idea here is to give the oats some color.

As you can see, there is a slight browning of the oats.

2. When the oats have browned to the color you like, you may add the butter and keep mixing it till all it has melted.

3.Then you add the sugar. Keep mixing till its all melted, it should start getting quite sticky.

4. Now you add whatever you want, from nuts to dried fruits. I for one added shredded almonds.

5. Add the milk gradually. Start with half of the amount, stir and add the rest. Leave it to cook at medium heat.

6. Keep mixing it and keep in mind that our aim is to harden the mix as much as possible. You should have something like this.

7. Since I wanted only half of the mix to have chocolate ( my husbands insisted on using chocolate) I divided the mix. I took out half of the mixture from the pan, left the other half in and added the chocolate.

After that I proceeded to melt all the chocolate.

8. Let the mixes cool down. Around 20 minutes, so they are hard enough to roll.

9. Prepare a bowl with water and have your topping ready. I used the toasted shredded coconut.

10. Dip your hand in the water first, then take a small portion of the mix and form a ball. Put the ball in the toasted coconut.

11. Roll the balls in the coconut and then remove them. Continue the process until you have used up all the mixture. Instead of this topping you can coat them in anything you want ( powdered cocoa or any form of shredded nuts )

And here we have the end product.

11. Put them in the fridge for at least 2 hours so they can harden and form nice round balls.