Foodie Fridays: Making muffins and cooking party

We attended a "cooking party" today, so I couldn't resist postponing the Friday food post til today so that I could blog about the food we made!  The "Cookyn with Mervyn" sessions are run by one of our bible study mate's brother-in-law, so she organized a session for some of us.

So anyway, the cooking party was filled with lots of good cooking tips and fresh ingredients...

You can put garlic cloves in the green contraption in the background, roll it between your palms, and voila!  Peeled garlic!

... and it was lots of fun!  The menu for the day:

Home-smoked salmon with Japanese cucumber yoghurt 

(the salmon was really moist!)

Salmon, all ready to be smoked

Spaghetti and prawns tossed in laksa and cashew nut pesto 

(this was so amazingly yummy, and surprisingly easy to make...)

Roasted Kurobuta pork with miso orange sauce

Chocolate mousse with fresh berries

Berry berry good... (just that I only could eat one mouthful thanks to my non-dairy diet!)

Oh... and mentioning my non-dairy diet reminds me, Ariana over at Becoming Mom recently blogged about some veggie muffins that she made for her son.  The recipe was non-soy and non-dairy, so I couldn't resist baking some on Friday, and let Junior J try one this morning for breakfast.  The muffins turned out super moist and pretty yummy (and you would never know that there was no dairy in them, plus that it had zucchini and carrots in there!), and the boy ate part of his muffin and seemed to like it. That means they have to be pretty good, since he's so fussy about his food, and usually spits new foods out when he tries them (no spitting this time!).  We put less batter in each cup since the boy has a small appetite, so they ended up looking like this:

The recipe is a keeper for sure, and I think I'll probably bake another batch next weekend!  Thanks Ariana for sharing, and have a great weekend everyone! :)