A year of living social trends: Health reset cooking
As part of this month’s trend Matt and Olivia decided to cook up a storm with ingredients which were the latest food trends. Here’s how it went, from Olivia.
Our trend identified turmeric, cauliflower, matcha and avocado as the up and coming social foods. Not ingredients I would commonly put together! I mean who doesn’t love a matcha covered cauliflower with avocado and turmeric dip?!?! Turns out most people… So we did some research and came up with two dishes that sounded, at the very least, edible.
For our main course we decided upon roasted turmeric cauliflower fajitas, with all the dips, and for dessert dark chocolate matcha date bars. The first step was roasting the cauliflower. Being a cauliflower virgin, I didn’t quite realise that there is a large stalk in the middle of the vegetable which made it quite hard to cut (got there in the end!). We then placed all the cauliflower on a baking tray and covered it with turmeric and olive oil. We left it to roast for 30 minutes.
Whilst that was cooking I set about making the guacamole. This involved scraping all the flesh of the avocado into a bowl and mashing it with garlic, lime and chilli flakes. Being head chef I delegated the mashing of the avocado to Matt, unfortunately he took mashing literally and mashed the avocado with a potato masher…
We then chopped the rest of the vegetables (courgette, peppers and onions) and stir fried them with more turmeric and BBQ seasoning. It was then ready to eat! We loaded the fajitas with the cauliflower mix, guacamole, tomato salsa, refried beans and a little bit of cheese. I have to admit it surpassed my expectations – it was very tasty. The cauliflower added a great texture and taste to the mix. One of Matt’s flatmates even said ‘1 out of 3 times I would have this instead of chicken’: a win for us!
We then started making dessert. We chose a relatively simple dessert: dark chocolate matcha bars. This involved adding dates (pitted), almonds, dark cocoa powder, a few spoons of matcha, some peanut butter and maple syrup – all blitzed in a blender. We then rounded the mixture into balls and had a taste. As a date lover I really enjoyed it! It would be great as a dessert, or even a pre gym snack.
