Autumn Recipe: Sweet Potato & Coconut Curry

Hello, there. Ever since moving out of my mamas house and living alone, I’ve begun to realise just how time consuming my favourite hobby can be and sometimes I can badly not be bothered with standing over a stove for six hours just to destroy my plate in a minute and a half.

So although I don’t claim to be the best cook on the planet, I’ve mastered the skill of throwing whatever is in my fridge together, making  something remotely tasty, all the while managing to remember NONE of what I did to tell you the next day.

But that’s what’s good with this recipe, if you can even call it that. It is a guideline, at best. Chucking your own herbs and spices in will ruin nothing.

I should also state that I use the word ‘curry’ lightly, and anyone of Asian descent should not send me complaints for doing an injustice to years of spicy food.

Ingredients

3 Sweet potatoes, peeled and chopped in chunky pieces

1 Aubergine, sliced/chopped

1 can of beans, (butter beans are my favourite, but haricot, kidney and chickpeas work too)

2 tomatoes, chopped

2 spring onions, finely chopped

1 clove of garlic finely chopped OR spoon of lazy garlic

1 yellow pepper (but seriously, what’s the difference, use whatever colour you want, I hear some people have a weird aversion to yellow peppers)

1 tin Pride coconut milk (This is important, I think this is much better to use than Dunn’s River which is 100% liquid. Pride is half solid half liquid, and helps with a creamy consistency)

2 generous teaspoons of coconut oil (100% pure and coarse, in a jar)

1 healthy squeeze of tomato puree OR half a carton of passata

Method:

Put your chopped sweet potatoes, aubergine, tomato, spring onions, pepper and garlic into your glass Pyrex dish and coat them in coconut oil. Give them a good mix and put them in the oven, preheated to 200°C for fifteen minutes just to get started. Once you take the dish back out, add the beans, the coconut milk and the puree and again, mix it well. Now is the fun bit. Open up your spices drawer and have a party. I use cumin, chilli flakes, medium curry powder and cinnamon in mine, because it’s a sweet and spicy mix to go with the sweet potatoes. I have an illogical, irrational dislike of salt, but this would be the part where normal humans season their food, so feel free! Put your improv curry in the oven for about 50 minutes, opening the door regularly to stir the dish around and make sure the juices are soaking through.

Once it’s done, I add it to coconut rice, sprinkle paprika on top and fall into it head first. If you’re as lazy and single as I am, you’ll notice the spare food left over. What I do is mix the rice with the curry and I refrigerate it. In the morning, I fill tortilla wraps with the curry and take my sexy burritos to work.

Let me know how it goes, and if you made any changes which you think make it way tastier. Show me your photos!

Emily

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Beauty Review: Korres Wild Rose Moisturiser

I am always keen to try new products, but speaking as someone with problematic skin (the list of skin flaws is endless) it is admittedly so difficult to do. Do you buy cheap, and if the product is a flop then you can still sleep easy at night because it cost £5? Or do you delve into your pocket and invest in a top shelf cream with a good reputation and assume it’s expensive for a reason? Problem with both avenues is, it only takes a single lather of cream and one face covered in red hot lumps to realise your money has been misspent.

Because I have combination skin I never know what to do. Using Simple is good for the part of my skin that’s sensitive, because there won’t be any flare ups. BUT, the rest of my skin feels starved, like I’m being given half an ice cube after months of dehydration. I’ve been searching for cream that is sensitive, natural AND that manages to be rich and deep conditioning all at once.

So. Korres. I’d actually never even heard of this brand before I caught it on the Asos gifting section while I was buying my particularly beauty savvy friend a birthday present. I had to check they were a cruelty free company, as she’d just achieved a cruelty make up cull and emptied her drawers of anything unethical – something I am dying to gradually do myself. To my pleasant surprise, Korres as of a year or so ago, are cruelty free.

Brill. So after buying my friend’s bits, I gambled and bought the Wild Rose moisturiser (for oily/dry skin) for £20 on Asos. A nice in the middle price for a luxury face cream, and I will continue to throw money at this company. My dry patches and blemishes cleared up in a WEEK. My face smells like a garden. I can tell I am using something simply good for the skin.

I went on my standard wiki rampage to dig up dirt on Korres and found they were a Greek company, founded by husband and wife Lena and George Korres. (I swear I didn’t know they were Greek before I bought it)

My favourite part of this brand is how obsessed the founders seem to be with good all natural products. They truly believe in homeopathy and that heritage is evident in their apothecary-like pharmacy full of herbal remedies, plants and ingredients. From primrose to aloe to yoghurt, their archive of little vials and bottles is full to the brim with natural alternative solutions to skin problems.

They have such a home grown comfort to their brand, as they state on their website that George Korres’ grandfather unknowingly created the first ever recipe for the company; a warming aniseed and honey syrup. They support farmers, they use 100% eco friendly planting and extracting systems, and they’re constantly researching new herbs and plants that can help them help my god damn skin.

I looked up the ingredients of the cream I bought (find them here) and saw that 96.8% of the cream was completely natural. If you guys identify with any of my skin problems, I seriously advise you peruse on www.korres.com. They are wonderfully helpful in that their website is FULL of information and omit no shady facts to get you buying. 

So go, buy. If for no other reason, my country is in need of some non-tourist related money.