“Instant” Tomato Sauce

I admit it, I’m spoiled. I like cooked vegetables, or at least some sauce with my pasta/orzo/couscous/rice. However, when you’re standing in front of the fridge 5 minutes before you need to leave the house in the morning packing food to take to lunch and you realize you’ve got small hamburgers and orzo without sauce, what’s to be done?

Eat your food dry, I hear your answer. Next time make something the evening before. I picked a different route.

I add a handful of cherry tomatoes to the box. When I eat lunch, I warm it in the microwave. The cherry tomatoes burst. I cut them up before eating, getting a nice fresh tomato sauce (you can’t get any fresher than that 😉 ). Granted, there are no fried onions in there and the tomatoes are still mostly raw, but it’s still a sauce, and that’s what’s important, isn’t it? And healthy! If you’ve got another few seconds to spare you can even add a dash of dried oregano or basil. Then you have Italian instant tomato sauce! 😛

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Healthy(er) microwave cakes

I get hungry mid morning and want something light yet sweet. For my kids, I sometimes make the microwaved cakes in a bowl, but for myself I was looking for something that I can finish by myself without feeling guilty 😕

I found this amazing and excellent recipe. At first I was sure something was missing as it had absolutely no added liquids. But it surprisingly works very well. As it’s based on fruit and oatmeal, it’s reasonably healthy (well… if you ignore the 1/4 cup sugar, of course 😉 ). I used cherries instead of blueberries, and added ground almonds and coconut.

My first try came out more like a pudding, because I tried to substitute part of the oatmeal with ground almonds. I heard from a friend that she regularly substitutes ground almonds instead of flour, so it made sense. However, almonds simply don’t absorb liquids the way oatmeal does and this is not a good substitute.

My next tries were more successful – in them I added extra ground almonds, and as my bananas were large I added more oatmeal as well. The result was a very satisfying fruit cake, which I ate with some yogurt or quark.

As always, my eldest loved the cake and my youngest didn’t 🙄

Ingredients:

1 ripe banana, mashed

One mashed banana

1/2 cup oats (I used Quakers). More if your banana is large.
1/4 cup brown sugar
2 tbsp ground almonds
1 tbsp coconut flakes
6-7 cherries, pitted and cut , or other fruit

[No oil, eggs, water, milk, baking soda, or baking powder. Cool, huh?]

Mix all ingredients together:

Before microwaving

Microwave for 3 minutes, check for done-ness by touching the top of the cake lightly. Top should be dry (assuming you didn’t touch a cherry) and firm.

If not done, add in one minute stages until done.

Done!

Let cool and eat!

I made twice the amount in four bowls for my kids to taste. The results were awesome and looked so pretty…

Four mini cakes

I also made an amount of these without cherries, to take with me to the hospital when I gave birth. They were sweet and very satisfying as a midnight snack when breastfeeding, and kept remarkably well.

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