The Watering Can & A Spinach Soup Recipe

Dear sisters!

I hope you've had a wonderful weekend!

I haven't had much going on besides studying... And shopping online ;-) Well, I bought 1 thing. Lol. It cost 2.88 US Dollars - at first. When I had to pay for it, they added 5.57 US Dollars because of it's weight and to send it to my address, they added 13.07 US Dollars so I ended up actually paying 18.65 US Dollars more than I thought I would at first :-/ Wow what a business. But I bought it - and will return it, if I don't like it anyway. What I bought was this (the blue one):

It's definitely not worth that much money!! But I had been looking for a cute and special watering can for such a long time. You know: for the bathroom. As muslims we use it so many times a day (and I'm not referring to watering plants ;-), so why not have a special one? Hehe. And I love how it looks a bit Middle Eastern or something.

- - -
On to something else:

If you don't know what to have for dinner today or tomorrow, you could try this delicious soup (I got the recipe here and had it translated on Google Translate):

SPINACH SOUP with fresh ginger & coconut milk

An easy and very simple soup to prepare. It is also a vitamin and mineral bomb without equal (both A, C, B2, B9, chromium and zinc -from ginger). 

In approx. 40 minutes you have a delicious soup ready for serving.

Ingredients (4 people)

     2 large leeks
     1.5 liter vegetable broth
     3 large handful's of fresh spinach
     1 can coconut milk
     1 tbsp. spicy curry
     1 tsp ground chilli or sambal oelek
     A piece of ginger, approx. the size of a thumb
     Oil for frying (about 3-4 tablespoons.)
     1 clove garlic, pressed
     salt and pepper

Cut off the ends of the leeks, cut them up lengthwise and rinse them in cold water. Chop them coarsely.

Cut the peel off the ginger and chop it finely.

Put leeks and ginger in a saucepan with the oil, pepper and curry.

Fry with medium heat for approx. 4-5 minutes, or until you start to smell the leeks really well.

Add broth, coconut milk and spinach.

Let it simmer, covered, for approx. 20 minutes.

Remove from heat and blend with a hand blender.

Taste with salt, a pressed clove of garlic and the soup is ready to serve.

-You might want to serve it with bread or rice. 

Bismillah! :-)

Cooking & Recipes

I really like to cook and I have learned to use cooking as some kind of therapy :-) - which makes me enjoy it even more. - Of course I also know days, where I don't feel like cooking anything... But mostly I try to be as mindful as possible, when I do prepare breakfast, lunch or dinner. Especially for dinner, when I cut vegetables, I notice how they feel in my hands, when I wash them. How they all sound differently, when I cut them and how wonderful they smell - uncooked or cooked etc. This changes the whole cooking experience and makes me feel very grateful especially for the fact that I can buy almost all kinds of foods and have something to eat every day, Alhamdulillah.

I made a list of dishes, which I cook during the week, to avoid having to think of a new dish every day. Sometimes I like to prepare new dishes though. Often I look for them on the Internet or I borrow cookbooks from the library.

I love the many food blogs around the net, so thank you for taking your time to share those wonderful recipes.

I would love to know some more websites (or blogs) with great recipes, so if you sisters would like to share your favorite ones with me, I'd be very delighted!

My favorite ones are:

foodgawker, foodbuzz and HealthyMuslim

Tomorrow my parents-in-law are visiting and I'm still thinking about what to cook for them for dinner (something vegetarian I think)... :-/ and also I wanted to bake a cake. I thought about baking carrot cake with delicious butter-frosting. If you have any wonderful carrot cake recipes or any other recipes you'd like to share (dinner and/or dessert) they're very welcome!! :-)

A Lovely Day

Assalaam Alaikum dear sisters!

I feel so content right now, Alhamdulillah! This weekend and this day has just been perfect. Today I got to do everything that I felt like doing and needed to do, such as cleaning the house, buying groceries, offering salat, listening to Qur'an, spending time with my husband and his daughter - and my rabbit :) And last but not least my cooking has been perfect to day, Alhamdulillah. I've prepared a Waldorf-salat (the recipe I linked to was not the one I used, I just wanted to post an English recipe (and not a Danish one). I don't add pepper, mayo, lemon juice and lettuce so you could leave that out too :). I prepared spaghetti bolognese (which is still cooking) and baked an Italian foccacia. My family is already excitedly waiting for the dinner and my husband already tasted the Waldorf-salat and fell in love with me all over again. Hehe. Of course these are not my homemade recipes, but still I'm glad the cooking has been a success today and I love serving good food for my family.

I hope you're all having a good day too, and if not, offer perhaps some more prayers and see how you feel afterwards :) Or try to think about 1 thing that you could do right now, that would make you feel just a little bit better, insha'Allah.

Stuck in the Room & Desperate Cooking

Dear All of You :)

I hope you're having a beautiful day and enjoying whatever you are doing, or can look forward to something you will enjoy, insha'Allah.

The reason for my lack of posting is that I have had a very busy week, visiting my dad to take care of him, starting University again, starting playing in a symphony orchestra again and cooking and picking up and bringing my stepdaughter. When we have her over I always have less time for Blogger etc.

Right now I'm actually stuck in the room, 'cause my husband has a business-partner for visit in the other room and he didn't close the door, although he promised to, and I don't like to disturb and I also don't know the man... At least my rabbit is in here with me. Hehe.

I should've gone to the library already, to pick up a lot of reserved books. Mainly cookbooks! I'm in a positive cooking-flow these days and want to learn to make even more dishes and hopefully stay in that flow.

Last year I liked watching the serie Desperate Housewives from time to time and actually, although I usually dislike TV and series, the serie inspired me to become a prouder "housewife" ;) I want to become even better at cleaning and cooking! At the library I'm going to pick up the cookbook from the serie. I'm excited to see which dishes they put in it and if I'll feel like many any of them :)

Hey now something is happening in the other room, the guy is going out on the balchony for a smoke! Yay. Then I can sneak out...


Oh no. I'm really disappointed 'cause it smells so much of smoke in the house now, even in my room with the door closed :-/ 'cause my husband let him keep the balchony door open and kept talking with him while the guy was smoking... Yuk!! Must be one important business-deal or something, since my husband is allowing this. And I still can't leave the room... Don't people usually have to go to the toilet after smoking??! :-D I'll wait for that now where I have already waited 1½ hours... Hehe. Take care all of you :)

Baking Basboosa

Everything looks a bit brighter when the sun shines - and when you just baked a delicious cake! I baked Basboosa, inspired by Alice's blog, where she posted a picture of this cake. I've been baking it many times, but using a recipe without shredded coconut. So today I wanted to try it with coconut and the result was so delicious that I, within few minutes, had three pieces! Hehe.

I want to share my recipe here with you:

Make your own syrup

2½ dl sugar

2 dl water

1 tablespoon fresh lemonjuice

Bring the sugar and water to a full boil in a saucepan, add the lemonjuice and let it cook for 5 min. Take the saucepan off the heat and let it cool.

Almonds without peel

In another little saucepan, bring water to a full boil and add about 14 almonds and let them cook until their peel is loose enough to be taken off. This will only take a few minutes. If you don't know how to get off the peel, you can read it here.

Making the cake

Basboosa - about 14 pieces

200g semolina

100g shredded coconut

100g butter

2½ dl yoghurt

125g sugar

2 eggs

1½ teaspoon baking soda

About 14 almonds without peel

1 or ½ portion cold syrup (depending on how "wet" you like your cake to be). I used ½ portion.

Put the oven on 180°C.

Melt the butter in a small pot.

Put the sugar in a bowl and add the melted butter and stir well.

Stir the two eggs in another small bowl and add them to the sugar and butter and stir well.

Add semolina, shredded coconut, baking soda and yoghurt and mix well.

Put the mixture in a roasting pan, add the almonds on top of the dough and bake it for about 30 minutes.

When the cake is ready, take it out of the oven and cut it into squares or hearts.

Pour the syrup over the cake, while the cake is still warm. Serve cold.

Look at all those delicious pieces :) I hope you will enjoy the cake too, when you've made it, insha'Allah.

Quick Delicious Asparagus Soup

You must also experience these days, where you don't feel like spending hours in the kitchen to prepare dinner. So what to do if you don't want to fast or let your family starve? (Hehe). Find an easy and quick recipe of course - and one of them I just prepared in less than twenty minutes: Asparagus soup. Yummi, it's delicious and with some homemade bread or other kind of bread with it, it's perfect.

I used this easy recipe (for 4 persons):

20 g butter is melted in a pot. Add 3 teaspoons all-purpose flour while stirring. Add 1 l vegetable broth, 500 g steamed white asparagus in small pieces (or 2 cans with asparagus -- if you use fresh asparagus, put them shortly in a blender, then they don't have to cook very long) and 1 dl cream. 

Let it cook for about 7 minutes. Add as much salt and pepper as you like and a little lemonjuice too, if you like that. And voilá! Delicious asparagus soup for you!

Some people add onion and garlic to this soup too - so do as you prefer :)

Perhaps some of you sisters will try this recipe once, insha'Allah.

Cracking Cooking-codes

Do you also get the feeling sometimes, when cooking, that there are some "cooking-codes", you just didn't crack yet?!

E.g. when I first wanted to make basmati rice the Indian way - the way where the rice isn't sticky, it took me many months to crack that code! I tried and I tried and either they burned on the bottom of the pot or they were too hard (and then of course non-sticky...) or just sticky or some of them were sticky and the ones on top weren't... Hehe. My husband was patient with me ;) Eating everything I served. Today my rice is quite good, in my eyes :) Almost not sticky at all - but still far from how my (Pakistani) mother-in-law makes her rice, masha'Allah!

There are many many cooking-codes I still need to crack, but the one that is a bit urgent for me is to make samosa's without getting many bubbles on the surface of them and avoiding the oil to get inside the samosa! That last part is a great mystery to me. Hehe. I read about it on a website yesterday and obviously I have fried my samosa's in oil which was too hot!

Another mystery to me is how to make big and soft sweet somali bread (which I wrote about in my post yesterday). I didn't really succeed in making them that way - although the taste was good :) And with a cup of chaï they were perfect this morning.

Well... Insha'Allah I will increase my cookingskills even more with time. I wonder if there is any person out there who always gets all recipies right at first try...  I doubt it. I love cooking food from many different corners of the world, so I haven't got a speciality. Sometimes I cook Moroccan, Arabic, Italian, African, random vegetarian, Indian, Pakistani etc. Often getting inspiration online (e.g. from sisters with food-blogs (thank you!)) or in cooking books from the library :)

Tonight I'm cooking linguine with mushrooms and cream sauce. When you add a little lemon to this dish, it is absolutely heavenly :)

Morning Thoughts

Just had yoghurt, the last ginger cookies from this Eid and African rooibush tea for breakfast. I want to try making Sweet Fried Bread, which was what a dear Somali sister gave me a few times this Ramadan. Yummi! It tastes so good!

These days are still diffucult for me because of marital difficulties... But I try to survive it by doing things I like to do and not spending too much time alone thinking and worrying. That usually doesn't help. What our marriage needs is to be defined a-new - and I don't think that is so easy at all. Mm, Allah (swt) will help me insha'Allah. Perhaps some of you out there also experienced something like this? If so: What helped you the most? How did you become closer again and regain the attraction and respect (among other things) towards each other?

Kofte with Tomato Sauce

Yesterday evening I found a recipe for kofte in tomato sauce. Here's how it looks in the making of it:

<-- Here's the minced meat with onion, cumin powder, salt and black pepper. In the little bowl to the left one of the koftes is being coated in plain flour.
Here to the right some kofte have just been put in the pan -->

<-- Finished frying the kofte.

And here's the end result with tomato sauce and parsley (and the kofte added to the sauce) -->




The only change I made to the recipe was to shape the kofte differently and to add two more table spoons of tomato paste and I didn't cover the kofte completely with water. It tasted really great! (But remember, especially in the Ramadan, to drink a lot after having eaten this!).

Check this blog out for the easy recipe!

Ramadan Day 21

If you dont' know what to make for Iftar yet, I'll share with you what I am preparing: Bhindi. I hope my husband will like it! I'll serve it with raita and a middle eastern dish from yesterday with rice and lentils and fried onion rings.
It didn't say anything about chili, kurkuma or garam masala - all great spices - but I added them anyway to spice the bhindi-recipe up a little.

And before I go I want to thank Allah that we are so privileged to be able to have Iftar every evening of the Ramadan, which many people in the world aren't... :-(

Samosa's and Naan Bread

Here's the naan bread in the making :-) I made 10 or 12 and warmly recommend the recipe.

Today I made samosa's. Hope they'll be delicious. I'm always excited to know if my husband likes what I have prepared. Usually he does, luckily ;-)

It's my 1st time making samosa's. These ones are vegetarian. Next time I'll try with mincemeat, I just need to find a good recipe.

Ramadan Day 13

I feel dizzy and funny today. I've slept two hours, been awake two hours, sleps two hours, been woken up for half an hour and slept three hours :-/ I feel like sleeping again... but there are things I need to have done like buying groceries at the store for tonight and the other days in this week.
The recipe for naan bread that I tried yesterday was great. Only I had to use a lot more flour than it said in the recipe. But my husband and I really enjoyed the bread :-) and also the aloo jeera. Now I need to find something else to cook for tonight. Sometimes I can't think of something to cook... I hope I'll know before too long ;-) insha'Allah!

Yesterday was a very special day where my husband and I had long serious talks about inner work and awareness, both achieving new insights in ourselves. I can't say it enough times: this holy month is amazing, masha'Allah.

Ramadan Day 12

I'm a bit tired right now, because of the fast. But masha'Allah the Ramadan is very giving when it comes to taking steps concerning self-development. - New insights and helpful thoughts almost every day.

In a few moments I'm going to prepare this Iftar's food. I'm going to make aloo geera and naan bread and insha'Allah it'll be a success :-) I found this recipe for naan bread and really hope it is as great as it looks.