Stuffed mushrooms

So, I've so far not been that adventurous since starting, certainly the cauliflower pizza was the most adventurous I've been up to now, but thought I'd share a few more ideas that I've had for easy vegetarian meal ideas that are Atkins induction friendly. 

First of all, this barely merits a recipe as it's so easy and probably something people do all the time anyway, but stuffed portabello mushrooms, here I've stuffed them with A little bit of shop bought pesto, a couple of chopped cherry tomatoes, some garlic and then topped with goats cheese, then they just go in the oven for about 20 minutes. So nice, really filling and taste very naughty without hardly using any carbs! 

I was so pleased to see that pesto is so low in carbs, it makes everything taste better and is so packed with flavour! 

Cauliflower crust pizza

Right it's day one and feeling inspired I headed to the supermarket to buy the ingredients for this recipe which I saw here, 

Well I will say it wasn't as good as the one in the picture and I've put this down to various reasons, namely:

a. I am not a particularly competent cook

b. I did not wring enough of the water out after cooking the cauliflower 

c. I only used parmesan and no mozzarella in making the base. 

Despite the above it was still somewhat of a success here is the finished product

The recipe can be found in the link above but to briefly summarise the way I did it:

Ingredients:

• one medium head of cauliflower
• parmesan cheese
• dried oregano 
• toppings (I used 4 mushrooms, goats cheese, sun-dried tomato purée and tomato pasta sauce, basil- to garnish)

Method:

• Cut the leaves off the cauliflower and some of the stem off and put the whole if it in the belnder untill it looks like this:

• Put it in a microwavable bowl and cover it and cook for 4 minutes 
• Leave it to cool down for a few minutes
• Put it in a tea towel and wring the water out, do this really hard and persevere as the water will keep coming. I didn't do this enough and I think it showed in the base. 
• Start mixing the cauliflower and also add the egg, a few pinched of the oregano and the grated parmesan. I just basically kept adding the parmesan bit by bit until the mixture started to resemble dough.
• Pop the dough on oiled greaseproof paper on a baking tray
• Start rolling it out until you have a smallish pizza base, mine looked like this:

• Pop the base in the oven at 200 for about 8 minutes, when you get it out it will look a bit like this:

• Then just treat it like a normal pizza base and add your toppings and put it back in the oven for about 10-12 minutes or until the top looks suitably browned!
• Easy as that! 

Intro...

So having just started the extremely daunting task of the induction phase of Atkins whilst also being a vegetarian  I thought I'd keep this blog as a way of charting for myself how I'm doing and also as a sort of scrapbook of all the recipes that I've tried (good and bad). 

I also thought it'd be nice as I'm UK based and lots of the recipes I have seen have not been and have measured things in cups or used ingredients that I've never heard of/ can't get here. 

Anyway I'm quite faddy so no sure how long it'll last but also thought this would be a good way of making me stick to it.