Sophie Dahl- Miss Dahl's voluptuous delights

Hello :) I've been meaning to post about Sophie Dahl's book "Miss Dahl's voluptuous delights" ever since I bought it a few weeks because it's just such a fabulous easy-to-follow cookbook! The book features 100 of her favourite recipes (with the vast majority being vegetarian) divided into breakfast, lunch and dinner of each season as well as a section on 'puddings'.
The presentation of the book is beautiful and rustic, making the recipes seem indulgent when they are infact quite healthy! Some lovely ingredients she uses include quinoa, buckwheat, ricotta, goats cheese and eggplant. I've already tried a few recipes from the book and recipes I really want to make soon include Tumeric tofu with cherry tomato quinoa pilaf, Lemon and ricotta pancakes, Wild rice risotto and Lemon Capri torte. You can view the book here. For lunch today I made her "Quinoa salad with tahini dressing". It's a light, summer-y salad and a simple way to use the wonderful grain, quinoa.

Recipe: Quinoa salad with tahini dressing (serves 2-3)
Ingredients
- 500ml/2 cups of vegetable or chicken stock
- 180g/1 cup of quinoa
- 1/2 peeled cucumber, chopped
- 2 spring onions/scallions finely chopped (I used some red onion instead)
- 1 plum tomato, finely chopped
- 1 red (bell) pepper, deseeded and finely chopped
- Fresh mint leaves, to garnish (optional)
For the dressing
- 4 tablespoons (or thereabouts) of olive oil
- Juice of 1 lemon
- 2 tablespoons of tamari (wheat -free soy sauce)
- 2 tablespoons of tahini (sesame seed paste)
- 1/2 a clove of garlic, peeled and chopped
- Honey (optional)

Method
Bring the stock to the boil, add the quinoa, cover and simmer for 10-15 minutes
Make the dressing- everything in a blender, and you could maybe add a little honey to taste
When the quinoa's ready, fluff it, pop the vegetables in, then douse it with dressing, and perhaps chop a few mint leaves on top. You won't need all the dressing but you can keep it in a jam jar in the fridge for up to a week.

The great thing about a recipe such as this is you can adjust it according to taste/ingredients you have. For example I tend to use less stock than recipes suggest so for this I used 1 cup of stock and 1 cup of water instead. I also substituted the spring onions for half a red onion and left out the red pepper. Because the dressing makes more than necessary you could also easily halve the recipe and just use that. 

And my sister picked some tomatoes from our garden today. Some of which went into the salad :)

And here's some more lovely music. It's "Flume" and "Skinny love" by Bon Iver, both currently on my 'Sunday morning' playlist. 

Hope it's been an enjoyable week! For me, HSC (end of highschool exams) results came out and I think I managed to get into the nutrition course I want to do at university! Yay :) And last night I went to Carols at the Domain last night, which was really good. Now I'm off for a run. The weather is just so nice...

 Less than a week until Christmas now! Oh, anyone cooking something yummy/creative for Christmas?! I need ideasssss ;)

Hannah x