All Cook With Me Live (CWML) videos were recorded LIVE, while Ashley and her viewers cooked together at the same time, but from the comfort of their own kitchens. Now freely available for you, each video is designed for you to play from a device in your kitchen while you cook along at the same time as Ashley, benefitting from step-by-step instruction and tips & tricks along the way.
For recipe details, visit www.ashleyjubinville.com
All CWML recipes are also available in published books for either digital or print versions.
Please LIKE and SUBSCRIBE if you enjoyed!
Ashley is extremely passionate about making everyday food healthier and helping you LOVE cooking. Her background was firstly in engineering so she loves problem solving to make things faster and easier to do – healthier cooking included! …But cooking is her passion!
She also wishes that every single child could receive a positive upbringing around food and the kitchen. Ashley believes that by helping parents redefine their relationship with food and by up-skilling them, they will be more able to help their kids enjoy cooking and enjoy making healthier choices. If you have kids between the ages of 3-15, check out her Generation Food Cookbook for kids and families. All recipes have a video of Ashley cooking with a different child (or two!) and kids love following along. Older kids can even follow the videos by themselves and ask adults for help with the stove or oven etc. You can sit back and relax while dinner is prepared for you and while your kids are learning valuable life skills.
Hello beautiful kitchen crew thank you so much for being online for cook with me tonight and welcome to those who are doing your very first cook with me live tonight so and i guess an extra special welcome i know that we’ve got a couple of teenagers on with us today so uh just
Recently the last couple of weeks i’ve spent a bit of time at the chancellor’s school talking to the year 10. so thank you very much chancellor school for having me for hosting me and i’m hoping that some of you teenagers that are on tonight are going to have some fun making some crispy
Fries and some french onion dip so that is what we’re making tonight and i’ve got so much i want to show you no need to freak out i’ve got a couple of interesting things in the kitchen here tonight i’m going to explain it as we go
And i just want to be able to show you how to make your own crispy french fries hot chips whatever you want to call them at home without needing to ever think about buying a frozen bag or maybe worse yet the ones straight from the shops that are done in the deep fryer
So these are going to be done in the oven we’re going to make them crispy and then we’re going to pair it with a yummy whole food real french onion dip not one that involves using a packet mix and a bit of yogurt or something like that
So i want to show you real food that is the goal give me a little hello let me know that you’re online let me know who’s cooking with you today in the kitchen whether you’re just watching whether you’re actually cooking with me at the same time
I love to hear all that feedback and likewise if you have any questions during the time and you’re on with me live please feel free to ask if you are watching this as a recorded one you can still send in your questions and you can still interact we do make
Sure to keep on there and keep regularly making sure you guys have your questions answered so let’s get stuck into it i’ve got a couple fun things to show you this crazy piece of equipment here i’m going to talk about in a second but what we want to start up straight
Away so that we don’t end up going on too long tonight is we’re going to start by getting the onions simmering down kind of sauteing we want to start caramelizing them so that we can put them into the french onion dip first so if you’ve if you’ve kind of got your
Kitchen set up already then join me we’re going to start with the onions and i’m going to just jump straight in so this is going to be the first step and a little bit of what i’m kind of trying to show you here is the idea of
Of a flow when you’re doing a couple of different dishes at once in the kitchen so usually speaking when i’m in a kitchen i’m going to try to do at least two things like two meals at once if not three sometimes that just means i’m doubling
One of the recipes and then making an extra one while i’m at it so when we do that we can actually reduce the total amount of time that we are in the kitchen is if we look at both recipes at the same time and some things might could be cooking basically while we’re
Preparing the other thing so that’s what we’re going to do with this recipe we’re going to do kind of two things at once now we probably only need two of these onions they’re a fair size you could do three with this recipe it’s quite nice to actually combine two different kinds of onions
So if you’ve never used kind of one of those white sweet onions they’re quite a nice one to use so i’m going to try that one as well as a brown onion or a yellowing in whatever you want to call that now in cutting onions it’s um
I debated getting out my scuba gear tonight so i didn’t have to worry about crying on camera for you because i tend to have pretty sensitive eyes when cutting onions i know everyone has their magic methods to stop stop the the tear ducts and all the
Acid that comes off the onion into our eyes i’ve had the most success with a candle flame but the only risk with the candle flame is that you kind of have to have it really close to kind of burn off the acid before it reaches your eyes
So i figured i’d kind of ditch that idea tonight and uh rather not do that on camera live so either that you could wear scuba goggles because we just don’t want to get those acids into your eyes and obviously if you’re going to be making a nice big batch of anything with onions
In it then it’s probably worth your while going to that effort but in the meantime i’m just going to try and do this quickly the other little trick you can do with onions is once they’re just like once you’ve quickly opened it like this then we’re going to give it a
Little rinse under some water so it could be cold water hot water doesn’t really matter but we want to start to dissolve and rinse off some of those acids that come out of the onion which kind of inflame the the liquid in the eyes so a couple little tips on onions there
In case anyone found that interesting hello amanda thank you you and zoey are on tonight good to hear you guys see you guys again thank you very much for being on miss you guys we probably need to catch up again and hear all about how things are going in your whole food world
All right and let’s get rid of these scraps straight away so if you’re new to i guess cooking tips and tricks or new to cook with me live you’ll notice that i always try to have my compost bucket or my scrap bucket right here beside me
So i can kind of put everything in straight away and then i also have a sink of hot soapy water run at all times when i’m in the kitchen so that we can just quickly rinse our fingers rather than wasting a lot of water running the tap all the time all right
Let’s cut these guys up so there’s no there’s not really any particular way that we need to worry about cutting these simply because we just kind of want them minced up so that we can turn them into a dip so half of them are going to get blended into the dip anyways
So you don’t really need to worry too much about what they look like those of you that are loving your therma mixes you might just want to chuck these in the thermomix and let them do the chopping for you i’m just going to rely on my sharp knife
And get them done as quick as i can so we don’t have any crying going on here it’s happening already don’t mind me if i don’t look at the camera for a second i’m just going to get this done with but yes chopping onions not my favorite thing
In the entire world to do i can promise you that how do you guys go with your chopping onion experiences am i just a total wuss i know it depends on the onions too all right so i’m gonna get out of that area where all that acid is just gonna go
Over here and wash my knife and then we’re going to get the pot that we’re going to put it in hopefully let our let the air clear and let’s drag all those onions into the pot and out of the way notice how i move the cutting board just off the edge of the
Bench top a little bit and that just helps me get the pot underneath so i can get a wider part of the pot in for scraping the onions in and hopefully there’ll be less mess on the floor that way so i’m just going to put that away from me for a second clean
The board and then what we’re going to do is we’re going to add the vinegar the olive oil and some salt in with it to help the caramelization process of the onions happen a little bit faster a little bit easier the salt is going to help break them down
Oh sorry those are really strong onions i should have got the scuba gear out all right so we’re going to need some olive oil some balsamic a little bit of salt as i talk to you through tears it’s good to be back with you guys we
Had a little bit of a of a break there for family reasons and back in the game and i’ve also got something else exciting to tell you at the end of this so okay i’m going to go brave the onions here in a second so we’re going to need about a teaspoon
And a half roughly of the salt and it might feel like a lot but it’s going to make a big batch of dip and compared to i guess using a dodgy salt in a purchased dip or in a packet dip this is definitely a good quality salt
We’re going to get some benefits out of all the electrolytes and minerals that we’re going to get from that and we’re going to do about three tablespoons of olive oil in with it all right so about a tablespoon sorry a teaspoon and a half we can kind of eyeball that one
Not super critical now the balsamic vinegar is not 100 critical either nothing is in any recipe but the reason for the balsamic is to kind of continue or accelerate that caramelization process we’re going to put about two teaspoons in if you don’t have balsamic that’s okay you can use apple cider vinegar you
Could even just use a little bit of coconut sugar to be honest because it’s really just the sugars that we’re gonna it’s gonna help them caramelize a bit faster i just find that the balsamic vinegar gives a nice flavor profile and it works works quite well okay and then three little tablespoons
Of olive oil again pretty approximate and then we’re going to get this onto a high temperature just to start out with just until we start hearing a bit of sizzling and then we’re going to turn it down and we’re just going to let it cook away on low temperature so that it can
Properly create that it’s called the my yard reaction uh it’s a french word and i probably should have said it properly in that case but it’s the caramelization process that we’re after and it does take time at a low temperature to develop the caramelization of the sugars within the natural onion
Into that nice kind of dark brown sort of more flavorful onion that we’re after okay so let’s get that onto the heat we can start out with uh well we’ll just not quite full heat and i’ll just let i’ll just wait until i start hearing that sizzle
And then we’ll come and give that a give that a stir and let it uh turn it down basically after that now while we’re there actually come back i want to show you this it’s nothing too complicated but we’re going to need a big pot for the blanching of the vegetables
So you might just want to get your pot out now and we’re going to roughly fill it about a third it could maybe be up to half but you don’t need to so by filling it with less water it’s going to happen a lot faster it’s going to boil a lot faster
Uh it’s going to save you water and it’s just a bit easier i find so we might as well while we’re at it we might have to turn it off in the meantime but we might as well just get that onto the boil and because it’s just water it’s okay if
It boils a little bit longer than it needs to and then we know it’s ready to go when we’re ready for it now we can go back and get into cutting up our chips wipe the tears onion tears geez how’s everyone else going kelly did you get onion tears thanks for
Being on tonight hey neve welcome um oh you’ve already cooked it well done that’s exciting i want to see if there’s any differences in how we’re going to do it tonight let me know and claire welcome excellent so good you guys are on tonight thank you
Hi jackie lovely to see you thanks guys okay let’s play a little game it’s called guess the vegetable so i’m gonna put these in a circle and you’re gonna type in and tell me what vegetables well you know that one i’m not gonna do that one what vegetables we have in this circle
So start with this guy okay we’re gonna do a little test so go in this order start with this guy and tell me what we’ve got here uh this one and the other ones i think you’ll probably ace so we don’t have to worry about that
Okay now i’m not going to say what they are yet but i’m going to start preparing some of the other ones and i’ll give you guys a chance to actually tell me what we’ve got here so i’m going to move that forward so go in a circle
Start with this guy and work through and we’ll see who gets bonus points tonight okay now um with this recipe recipe for the crispy fries the coolest thing i think is that we can pretty much use any root vegetable and even some that wouldn’t necessarily be defined as a root vegetable
In this recipe and you know what because you’re doing things at home and because it’s not the end of the world and we’re not presenting this for a michelin star at a restaurant if we don’t get perfectly crispy fries because you wanted to use zucchini because you love zucchini or pumpkin
Go for it don’t stop there just because it might not be seen to be one of the more crispy choices for um for a hot chip okay so definitely got to get some carrots in there the carrots work super well same goes with the sweet potato and the um the potatoes okay and
Um i think i need to kind of bring up a topic because i’ve had i’ve had it come up so often with uh i guess in the last couple of months even and the topic is about the potato so i’ve had a lot of people that are you know doing whichever
Choices of diet that you’re choosing most of the time it’s involving trying to do a low-carb diet and really kind of people being scared of the potato now so i just wanted to say that you know you don’t necessarily have to binge on it but you also don’t have to be afraid
Of eating the poor little potato because the potato does have believe it or not a lot of other benefit other than just a slightly higher starch content than some other vegetables so it’s not to say that you’re going to eat maybe your entire meal of potato but a little bit in moderation please
Don’t eliminate the beautiful potato from your diet because it too does have other beneficial compounds in it that we want to be eating um so okay how else we’ve got jan on tonight hello jen thank you and alison thank you for being on lovely to have you vivian welcome
And angela good to have you back so questions okay so good you guys have got some answers in here so first of all we started with um allison says potato a swede a tarot a sweet potato a dunno and a beetroot i love it vivian potato turnip taro sweet potatoes celeriac and beetroot
Okay not quite there yet angela potato um oh a swede a sweet potato uh times two don’t know and beetroot okay we’re still still not quite there yet oh amanda let’s see potato oh not quite turn you guys are so close all right i’m glad
We did this have a little fun with some veggie guessing games so what we have here i know it does look like taro it’s actually cassava and they are they are different but um so you’re right we’ve got a potato this is a purple potato okay we’ve got a swede s-w-e-d-e
Different to a turnip okay it’s much nicer roasted whereas a turnip i find this kind of can be a little bit bitter when roasted so i like to turn up fresh so this is a cassava and we actually make the not we they someone makes this is what you make tapioca flour from
So when they extract just the starch from this plant or this root then you get the tapioca flour but you can also buy cassava flour which still has all the extra fiber in it and it behaves pretty much the most directly to a regular wheat flour without having any gluten in it
So yeah cassava then we have a purple sweet potato this little guy you were right i think amanda got this one first a kohlrabi very good guess we have them in well so most of the varieties you’ll find in a light green like this or in a bright purple
They’re absolutely beautiful and don’t throw away these leaves so these leaves you can actually steam and have just with a little bit of olive oil and lemon or salt and vinegar sorry salt and pepper um so yeah don’t don’t throw these guys out there they’re delicious and they’re just a great other leafy
Green vegetable so save those and steam them okay and what we’re interested in for now for the crispy fries is i’m gonna peel this skin off and we’re gonna have the inside it’s also really good raw okay whereas the cassava you don’t eat that raw okay so
Definitely this is a great raw vegetable just as a crudite so just cut it up like you would celery pieces carrot pieces and have that with dips and then obviously yes we have the big beautiful big fat beetroot hello jaden and saxon and xander you guys are on tonight thanks for being on
There with mom very cool okay so i want to turn these into crispy fries i want to show you guys how it goes uh let’s start out with the swede for now and before we get to this big bad boy unfortunately it’s really only suitable to the potato
So i’m going to show you that when we get to the potato so let’s take off kind of that big top from the swede we don’t need to take much else off and the rest we can usually do with a bit of a peeler now if you’ve
Given it a good scrub you don’t absolutely have to peel the suede but if it’s your first time with it then we might want to give it a little peel just for texture purposes okay so it’s quite easy to peel not too thick of a skin unlike some of the others we’re
Going to get to here in a second and then pretty straight forward from there so any shape you want to put that in i’m going to go we could do rounds let’s just do some some i guess regular fry shapes if we can okay now a little trick regardless of
Which vegetable you’re cutting you kind of want to have a think about how tough or how hard that veggie is and you might not know this until you cook a couple so the reason i say that is because if you’re going to be putting these all into the same pot at
Once to do the blanching you want to kind of make sure that the tougher veggies are cut a little bit thinner so they cook easier and then the softer veggies you can cut a little bit bigger so that they cook sort of at the same rate okay so you can really customize
That and and do that however you wish so we’re just going to transfer these to a bowl for now there we go and let’s go to the sweet potato next we’ve got two different kinds of sweet potatoes here the coolest thing about this one there’s like there’s like a reverse version of
This there’s one that has a white skin but a purple inside this one has a purple skin but a white inside so let’s we might as well use the whole thing okay and again you do not have to peel these so you may just wish to take off all the
Blemishes kind of like this maybe there’s some deep holes in some cases you might want to take them out just in case they actually go further into the skin as a blemish but we don’t actually need to peel these provided they’ve had a good scrub okay
So i might just do a little bit of kind of cosmetic shaving of this give it an extra little wash [Applause] and we’ll call it good so with hot soapy water so isn’t it cool that we can have the purple skin but the white inside and then the exact opposite in a
Different variety of sweet potato i love it okay now just as a quick little check on your onions if you can hear them sizzling we can turn them down let’s just have a check on them okay we’ve definitely got some action happening there so we’ll give them a little stir
And time to turn them down now just um be aware that if you’ve put the balsamic vinegar in there your onions are going to look brown before they’ve actually caramelized so don’t be fooled we’re gonna turn that down to maybe three maybe two that’s pretty hot burner so i’ll leave
That at about two and we’re gonna let that just caramelize and our water is boiling so let’s just turn that off for now we’ll come back to that in a second there we go okay so back to our sweet potato let’s get some french fry shapes happening there
And if it’s too tough to cut through or your knife is a bit dull make your life easier so go in half first and then you might want to work with a flat surface so it’s going to be much safer to cut through if you’ve got a flat
Surface to work with there we go little french fries shapes as thick or as thin as you want obviously the thinner you go the more cuts you have to make but the more crispiness and the more flavor you can get on the outside so there’s a bit of a trade-off there
There we go nice flat surface and those of you that have a food processor with slicing blades you may just want to always make round chips so that you can stick the veggies through the food processor and let it do all the chopping for you so that’s entirely up to you it’ll
Probably be easier than to get the really thin fries if you use a machine like that how’s everyone going is anyone cooking at the same time are you all just watching me hopefully not stuff up okay one little trick too when it comes to sweet potato in particular the purple
One and the white one they oxidize quite quickly so if you don’t want that to happen we just need to add a bit of water to them and just let them soak in the water because then that prevents the oxygen from getting to them and oxidizing not that it’s going to necessarily
Affect the quality or the taste it’s more just aesthetic so we’ll just put a bit of water in there for that one okay kohlrabi here we go my favorite vegetable i have such fond memories of the kohlrabi because my dad used to grow this in the garden when we were kids and he
Loved his garden so much he would have he had a knife in the garden so that we could actually go out into the garden and just eat straight from the garden basically so he would pick us a kohlrabi he would peel it with a knife he even had a little camping
Camping salt shaker out in the garden that he stored right beside the knife the knife was like literally stored in the garden in the dirt between the wood and the dirt and he’d take it out of the dirt clean it off and we just get to sit there and
And try this kohlrabi just a little bit of salt on it and i’ll never forget that it was such a good a good memory of literally just knowing exactly where your food comes from and how it grows so it doesn’t have that thick of a skin
You can use a peeler or you can use a knife a paring knife would be easier than the big one i’m using okay and sometimes you’ll get them if they’re really like if they’re old and they’ve been picked a while ago or if they’re at the end of the season they
Might be a bit tough so hopefully you get a good one for your first time around because they should be really crisp and light and it’s almost the texture of kind of a gnashy pear if you’ve never had an ashy pear it’s kind of well actually i think i could have probably
Cut it in this machine so it’s quite similar to the potato in texture but the flavor is how do i describe the flavor it’s kind of like a a non-spicy radish so it’s quite light and crisp and fairly neutral in flavor got a bit of crunch to it
I think it’s most similar so if you’ve ever eaten a raw potato it’s kind of like eating raw potato there’s not a lot of flavor there but it is quite nice especially as a dipper in dip so there’s our kohlrabi forgive the crunching it’s really yummy
All right next up we’re going to save the beetroot till last because as you can imagine it’s going to make everything red let’s get into the cassava now this has got a much tougher skin so depending on your peeler most of them probably won’t cut it so
You’ll notice it’s quite quite tough to cut so what we might do i’m going to cut it in half and even cut it in half this way lengthways okay you’ll notice it’s quite tough sometimes there’s quite a bit of a root like a stem in the middle
This one seems to be a nice tender one so we don’t have to worry about that but sometimes you’ll find there’s quite a stem in the middle and we kind of want to take that off so then we want to make sure we get this whole
This whole skin off so see see how there’s an outer skin and then there’s this thicker skin on this side right so if it comes off nicely like that for you and you can just peel it by hand that’s excellent otherwise we need to get in there with
The knife and take off that outermost skin but it’s pretty easy so it’s actually kind of a nice it’s almost like nature’s nature’s packaging nature’s natural um skin coating i guess you could say it’s pretty cool it’s kind of like the bark of a tree even
So there we go i’ll take off that’s that bad boy okay cut that one in half so you can kind of see it’s a bit going to be maybe a bit hard for the camera to see here but there is a bit of a root
In the middle so i’ll just take it out and show you kind of what i’m talking about here it’s not the end of the world it’s kind of just it’s kind of just a bit tougher so it’s just kind of like a the middle of a pineapple for example
You don’t have to take it out you might not even notice but in some people you might just want to take out that little bit of a middle middle core bit so it’s just um just a bit tougher not not a big deal okay and then we’ll get the rest of that
Skin off so this this i mean you can get this quite commonly in north america they’re normally called yucca fries so yucca yucca is the other name for the cassava so yucca chips or yucca fries even yucca tortillas you can make a lot of things out of this beautiful starchy tuber and
In parts of the world where food is scarce it is a very valuable food source because it actually is quite high in calories and high in starch which you know in every culture other than our you know extremely privileged and some sometimes over abundance of food it’s um it’s a
Very valuable food source in that sense because it’s very dense in its nutritive value and its ability to sustain the body okay how is everyone going anyone finding this interesting with the cassava hello carmel welcome thank you for being on tonight watching vivian where you get your cassava and
Kohlrabi from that’s a good question now it’s not always at the same place sometimes your local produce store you might actually have to ask them if they can get it in sometimes they only bring in a small amount so sometimes you might miss it in in your regular produce store they
Might just have a little box of it kind of somewhere with their other more rare things otherwise just ask ask for them to get it in definitely when it’s in season you’ll be able to find it at the farmers markets well i say definitely but the good farmers markets that have that
Extra selection that’s not otherwise available in the supermarkets so there’s not i guess there’s not a consistent source these are things that generally need to be in season for us to be able to find them so sorry i can’t point you to a specific location it’s kind of one of these bonus bonus
Vegetables that when you do see them you can just pick them up now that you know what they are and give them a try remember those of you that have worked with me a few times already probably know my rule of every time i go to the farmers market or
Or go shopping i try to get one new food and test one new food every time i go not two just one because then you’re actually more likely to go and work with it rather than be overwhelmed by the number of new foods that you have no idea what to do with
So just try one new food every time you go shopping and next thing you know your world will be hopefully transformed and you’ll have a bunch more variety in your diet which will hopefully then translate to more more likelihood that you’ll get what your body might be lacking
Okay so it is a tougher one you saw i had to work a little bit more for that one so we got some cassava chips happening and we might as well do half a sweet potato we’ve got to get some color in that and again just give that a scrub
I’ll just maybe touch it up any little blemishes that might go more than skin deep like that one we just want to check them there we go so not only is this going to save you you know a bit of extra weight in veggies that you’ve paid for
Just by spot peeling but hopefully if you can start getting more and more organic foods in your diet then you’re going to be also getting extra nutrition from leaving the skin on so in a lot of foods there’s actually a concentrated amount of nutrition in the skin
And so that’s what we’re that’s what we’re after that’s what we’re looking for better value for your dollar better value for your body and less waste there we go okay now i did want to quickly talk about the fact that you might be looking at
This going oh my god that’s a lot of work to make hot chips okay now i i get that i understand that compared to buying a bag of frozen already semi-cooked fries it is a little bit more work and because of that you actually then get the benefit of having a selection
Of vegetables which is not only exciting but better for you better for your diet you know where they come from you know the quality you know they’re fresh you know that you’re going to be able to make them with you know what they’re going to be boiled in and cooked in basically
And if you do this efficiently and what i mean by that is if you get yourself set up to make it so that you every time you do this process you kind of try to maybe make a triple batch and i’m going to show you the point at which then we freeze
So that we can just easily take them out of the freezer and pop them into the oven on a busy friday night now if your family absolutely loves the hot chips and you finally got the kids eating veggies because you can cook them like this it’s a great start then
You might even want to invest in a piece of machinery something like this so that you can do potatoes even faster okay and i’m totally okay if it’s gonna get a child to get more into their vegetables even if it means they’re eating mostly potatoes in the beginning
But they’re tasting the other vegetables then i’m absolutely okay with you know having that potato in their diet because it’s a good way to start introducing it making it fun for the kids and something like this is is the commercial version i did buy the domestic version first and it broke so i
I don’t remember how much i paid for this it might have been 150 and then we realized we needed to screw it down to something otherwise it was kind of flipping up on us but hey we did it once now we’re set up and the one time every six months that i go
To make a lot of hot chips it’s useful so here we go let’s see let’s hope it works for us there’s our purple potato isn’t that cool purple potatoes i love it let’s do one of the normal ones mussels there we go okay so it is very quick and as you can
Imagine how fast we could punch through enough for a family then you could just get your triple batch happening you could even start a bit of an assembly line get the kids to help out and and then in the blanching process they only need to cook for about six
Minutes in the water so you could even fill the pot take them out toss them in their seasonings and then freeze them in their seasonings after they’ve been blanched so that we can put them in the oven very easily next time there we go come on
Yes so you can imagine there’s quite a bit of pressure quite a bit of torque and stuff on this so you kind of want to get a good one but then it goes pretty quickly and obviously the littler potatoes are easier it’s kind of fun there we go so that’s pretty quick isn’t
It i mean in terms of saving you a bit of time and energy it’s worth it if you’re going to do a big batch okay so there’s our potatoes let’s pop them in [Applause] i always make a big batch of these because they go pretty quickly in our family
All right so i’m going to keep that as is um i’ve said about two kilos in the recipe this just looking at it is possibly maybe a little bit more than that it will be actually um that’s okay we’re just gonna i’ll show you that you don’t really have to
Look at the recipe once you’ve done it once there’s a lot of flexibility in this it’s just the key concepts i want to show you okay now the only thing i want to mention is in the event that you didn’t kind of adjust the thickness of your cuts for the
Different size are the different toughnesses of the veggies then you would be best to cook them separately so most the time you know most the time when i do this i’m not using five or six different vegetables i’m choosing maybe three and then you can really be in much more control
Over how long they blanch for okay so next step is the blanching let’s come on back it’s probably time we can actually preheat the oven before we start the blanching process so if you haven’t already done that let’s turn it up to 200 degrees celsius or about 400 degrees fahrenheit
And actually i want to bring you over and i want to show you what i mean by getting your oven set up in this case okay so we’re going to turn that on to about 200 and i want you to try to maximize your oven space so before i make that too loud
Basically we’re going to try to get as many trays into your oven at once as you can now depending on the size of your oven you could maybe do three or four trays if you only have two racks that come with the oven you can actually create a third one
If you don’t have this piece you don’t have this piece that comes with your oven that’s okay you can just get out your stainless steel baking rack and put that down the bottom because the elements are actually right there in the bottom of the oven so
We don’t want to put the pan directly on the bottom of the oven or everything will burn onto it so you can actually use the um the stainless steel baking rack as a bit of a distance between that and then you can get a third shelf in your oven
So ideally you’ve got this extra piece that goes in the bottom of the oven so that we can use that as a shelf the other thing you can do is sometimes depending on what bakeware you use it’s going to take up the whole width of your oven perfectly so it itself can act
As a shelf in the oven so it just depends on what your setup is so let’s get that preheated and question uh okay so nev excellent so advice from brisbane is that the mount gravatt farmers markets have cassava quite regularly that’s excellent and uh good arm workout
Yes i know that’s lovely thank you vivian hi there the beets you’re right i haven’t done the beets yet i’m going to cut them after because they turn everything red so i will i will do them thank you for the reminder i’m just going to start out with this
One so i can get you guys going okay let’s get that that hot water back on the boil okay and then we’re going to do the blanching process now to facilitate this the easiest thing is going to be because we’re going to because i use this bowl as my transfer bowl we’re
Probably going to need another another bowl so in future if you’re not doing this big of a batch you can just leave them on the on the cutting board but i’m actually going to get another bowl to put them into when we’re done okay so even if it’s not perfectly
Boiling yet that’s okay we can just start by getting them into the hot water very carefully it doesn’t splash you okay and we don’t want to overfill it so you know you might want to look at how much you have you could do two batches you could do three
Probably the less you do at a time the the better you i guess the more happy you’ll be with your results so we just want to kind of get them all into there at once and we want about six minutes now that depends a little
Bit on how thick you’ve cut them and how much of a rumbling boil we get that too but we want about six minutes so um my timer on here is annoying so i’m gonna get my wonderful cameraman to set me a six minute timer and let me know when we’re at that
And uh and then we’re gonna we’re gonna check on it at that point so what we’re looking for if you don’t have a timer you don’t actually have to time this you could just check on them we want to be able to just be able to put a fork into these pieces
Without it at all feeling fully cooked and the reason for that is once we start tossing it with the flowers and the coatings we don’t want them to fall apart as they toss okay so it’s we just we’re just doing this to draw out some of the starches from the chips
So that they actually crisp up in the oven this is the secret method and i know it’s an extra step but i promise you this is how all the hot chips are done in i guess the restaurants the cafes even the frozen ones you buy in this in the supermarket they’ve all
Been blanched in advance so that you can get those crispy chips after okay so we’ve got our six minutes it’s on the boil our onions are going to town hopefully they’re just nicely simmering along there on a low heat starting that caramelization process it normally takes about 15 or 20 minutes
For this amount of onions in this size pot so we’ll let them do their work okay and then what you’re going to need to have ready for when this is ready to take out ideally if you have a slotted spoon that’s great otherwise you can also use a metal
Sieve or colander like this and then if you had some tongs you could just take them out put them in here let them drain in the water we want to keep the water for the next batch and then you can take them out that way so whatever kind of setup you’ve got
Again if this is the type of thing you want to be having for your family regularly you only have to get set up once so you only need to kind of figure out and and maybe you have to go and get a slotted spoon but then you’ve got it you’re set up and
You’re it’s going to be easier every single time you do it okay so while that’s happening that’s going to start to i guess go fairly quickly what we can do now is make up a bit of a premix for all of our dry ingredients and our flowers that
We’re going to put on top so we can we can get those out if you don’t already have them out let’s bring them over we’re going to need some tapioca flour we’re going to need some polenta and if you’ve got almond meal i’ve got a little bit of sunflower and pepita meal
Here just left over so i’m going to use that up so we really just need kind of i guess some texture some flavor a little bit of crunch that’s going to happen with that so i’m going to use those ones so let’s come back and we’re going to
Make up our essentially it’s kind of a pre-mix for your crispy fries and to that effect if this is something again that’s a regular staple in your family then you may wish to make yourself up a pre-mix of this mixture and put it back in your pantry in a jar labeled crispy fry
Batter or crispy fry mix okay so that’s another option that you have to make yourself more organized okay so i’ve got some tapioca flour and then we’ll just need a little bowl nothing nothing crazy just to mix that up in and in terms of spices this is where the
Recipe is just a guide guys so you can do whatever you want for spices i’m going to give you some ideas you do not need all of these okay so you could spice it up however you want in the recipe i’ve called for a cajun blend which is essentially like a taco seasoning
So ideally you’ve got your own made up and it’s ready to go so we could do a taco seasoning hot chip or french fry you might just want to sprinkle some rosemary on top and just have rosemary chips you could do moroccan why not if you’ve
Got a nice moroccan spice blend and you if you smell it and go yep that’s the flavor i want on my fries tonight then why not you might even just want to put dill some fresh dill sprinkled over it or just nutritional yeast and salt and pepper even italian spice mix okay that
Makes a delicious kind of well i guess more of an italian slash sort of pizza flavored one or you could do curry chips so choose your favorite curry powder and that makes a yummy chip as well so i’ll let you choose i don’t know what we feel like tonight
What do we feel like tonight you guys vote tell me which one you want i want to hear about it i’ll just do that after all right so hopefully i’m going to be told when my six minutes is up and in the meantime we need our measuring spoons where did they go
Okay so let’s just make up our pre-mix now again if you were doing this for a lot of them you’d probably times the batch by 10 so that you at least had that for the next 10 times you’ve got to make it so we need approximately two tablespoons of tapioca starch
If you haven’t got tapioca starch you could probably get away with potato starch not potato flour they are different okay uh and as a matter of fact i have misguided you a little bit because normally we put the tapioca starch on first so i’m gonna get another bowl sorry guys
At least i caught it okay so it’s gonna be a bit easier to work with so let’s save that tapioca starch it’s an extra little step but it’s going to make a difference in how the chip holds the batter on it okay not the end of the world if you’ve mixed
It in but just one little little tidbit there now for the the polenta and your seed mix we need about half a cup approximately a third of a cup depending on how big of a batch you have because i have quite a big batch there
I’m going to do the half a cup of polenta now please make sure that you’re buying organic polenta okay polenta is made from corn and uh it’s just yeah corn is one of those crops that’s been kind of heavily heavily changed over the period of time
So we want to make sure that any corn products that we’re having it’s pretty important to get organic with that so that’s just a bit of sunflower and pepita meal as i said before and then we want to put some salt with it so about a teaspoon of salt
Has our time cameraman close now all right we’re gonna go take those out so let’s do a teaspoon of salt and we’re gonna go take out the hot chips from the blanching water look at those colors wow that’s so bright with those purple potatoes and the yellow cassava so cool
Look at the colors okay so we want to get all those out and then we can transfer that into another bowl if there’s a couple in there still it’s not the end of the world they’ll just be a little bit more cooked and might go a bit mush but that’s okay
Okay so there we go and the next lot can go in so you can also do it this way which could be a little bit more mucky but we’ll do another batch this way there we go okay so we kind of want to get i’m doing thirds you might be doing half
Half batches i’m gonna do thirds that’s about right okay another six minutes please jeeves and we’ll continue over here all right we’ve got our salt in let’s choose a spice did you guys vote moroccan okay vivian won oh someone said kj matt matt said cajun i didn’t say cajun okay i’m gonna try
Um i can’t decide i always do cajun moroccan thanks vivian let’s see how that goes i don’t think it’s too spicy good uh all right so again now depending on your mix we’re gonna look for maybe between one and two tablespoons and because i’ve got the teaspoon in here one tablespoon equals three
Teaspoons so i’m gonna do about three teaspoons which is one tablespoon of moroccan spice and vivian it’ll be all your fault if those taste like crap no i’m kidding thank you okay let’s give that a little toss nothing really that important here and then we can go straight to our first lot of
Chips here we go so while they’re still a little bit hot this is kind of the ideal time to start putting our little bit of tapioca starch over top of them okay if you need more it’s fine the recipe is just a god and we just we don’t want to put too
Much otherwise they’ll go a bit gluggy so then this is why you want to get a big bowl you ready this is the fun bit this is when you can get the kids involved so you got to practice your bowl toss i don’t know if there’s a prize at the
End other than dinner but there you go we just want to get them covered in that just lightly okay that’s kind of looked to kind of dry them out a little bit which is good because now we’re going to put on a little bit of liquid to create our next sticky layer
For the last crunchy topping so we want to put a little bit of olive oil now if you want to measure this you can but i’d rather you actually learn how to do this by sight a because it’s going to be a lot less stressful the next time
You go to do it and b because you’ll actually learn something so we don’t want to douse them okay we just want a little sprinkle because i’m doing a third of the batch and i called for about two tablespoons of of olive oil total you probably only want to go less than a
Tablespoon on this and then a non-dairy milk or water okay so i’m just using a little bit of bon soy here a little sprinkle sprinkle you’re better off doing that twice rather than getting too much at once okay a little toss of that and then about a
Third of our mixture right so we’ve got a third of potatoes so we want to go about a third of our mixture again not the end of the world if it’s not exact okay and if you want to put extra on and make it extra crispy you’re very welcome too
They might just need to cook a little bit longer and be at the top of the oven a little bit longer but there we have it it’s that simple guys so this is the stage at which you would freeze them and i would recommend freezing them initially flat
On a tray so the same tray that we would otherwise be baking them on i’d recommend you freeze them on this so that when you take them off once they’re frozen you take them off and then you could put them in a container or in a bag
And they wouldn’t all lump together in one big mess so ideally you want to be cooking them straight from frozen so they need to be individual when you take them out of the freezer like the ones you buy in the shops so i would freeze them exactly like i’m doing here
On this tray we don’t want to crowd them okay i could get my fingers in there but okay so we don’t we don’t want to crowd them but if we freeze them flat like this then at least once they’re frozen you can break them up they’ll all be individual
Fries and they’ll work even better when you go to actually cook them straight from frozen okay so now this is a slightly important step you really kind of want to make sure we’re not crowding them to bake them and that’s because otherwise they just won’t be as crispy so you want to give
Them some space it might feel like you don’t have enough on your tray but space is good for crisp if you like soggy fries go ahead and load them up and the other little trick to crispum is going to be to give them a little bit of a rotation in the oven
Because they’re going to get the most crisping on the very top and the very bottom of the oven so we kind of want to let them all have a chance in that in that light okay in that direct heat so we’ll just do a little bit of rearranging
And then our first first batch can go in how are we going question uh can polenta be replaced okay uh hannan good question polenta yes so if you weren’t to use polenta you could use extra seed and nut meals so you could use extra almond meal sunflower meal is probably a good one
For that it’s quite a neutral flavor and it’s a bit less expensive than almonds as well what else could you use instead of the polenta you could use gluten-free breadcrumbs so if you have like a rice crumb or if you’ve got you know if you’re organized enough to
Have your own kind of croutons or or gluten-free bread dried out then you could use that you could just crush that up in a food processor until it’s um kind of this the texture of polenta and you could use that instead so hopefully that’s useful for you okay
And then straight into the oven guys and even if these are ready before the others that’s okay we’ll just get them going and then our six minutes is about up all right thank you so it should flow together nicely i just need my bowl okay so i’m just gonna do these two
Batches guys just for the sake of time tonight and then i want to show you the the french onion dip obviously okay so we’ll get this batch done and dusted and i’ll cook the other ones later but just so you know this is what i mean by
Kind of while you’re at it if you can just do a double or a triple batch and then get some in the freezer while you’re doing this then it’s going to be so much easier and so much less stressful the next time you go to you go to make
Hot chips okay it’s going to make it doable it’s going to prevent that temptation for you to just get take away guys and you’ll be so happy you did it so a little bit of pre-organization and you’ll be set okay so nice quick and easy once you’ve got your flow on
A little bit of tapioca starch we might go a little bit more okay a dash of liquid doesn’t have to be the both you could just do the non-dairy milk and a bit of crispiness so i’m curious to know is this easier than any of you might have thought it was
Like i know it started to look like a lot of work but hopefully you can see that once you’ve done it a couple of times pretty darn quick okay There we go spread them out and pop them in the oven so you could add more oil if you wished to make them kind of that little extra bit crispy but sometimes it can actually work against you sometimes it actually locks in the starch from the um the vegetable and actually makes it
Mushy so i’d probably recommend it’s better for the body too if we go less oil straight into the oven okay french onion dip let’s bust this one out quickly because you can’t have these fries without it in my opinion just quite funny okay so this one’s pretty straight forward
Um we’re gonna need a blender the better the blender you have the smoother the dips gonna be so again not the end of the world you might just end up with a textured french onion dip which is absolutely okay okay and for this one we are going to
Use the onions as they are they should be pretty much ready by now but just to give them a couple minutes longer let’s add all the rest of the ingredients into here and then we’re going to blend it up so we’ll need we’ve already put the salt in we’ve
Already put the olive oil and the balsamic we’re going to need about a cup of cashews okay so i’ve had these soaking if you accidentally forgot to soak them not the end of the world you just will probably get more texture in your dip so they might they might not go as soft
See how they kind of look plump and i guess swollen they’ve absorbed the extra liquid so we’re going to drain that off and put that straight in okay we’re going to need about a tin’s worth of white beans now if you’ve got butter beans that would be delicious
If you’ve just got regular old cannellini beans that’s okay too and we don’t want the liquid from that so we’re going to get rid of Let’s get rid of that liquid so it’s really only the onions that take a bit of time and as you can see if we started ahead like we did with this one to get them caramelizing while we do the rest of it this part actually comes together quite
Quickly so we’ve got our cashews we’ve got our white beans onion powder is a very key ingredient in a french onion dip even though we’re using the fresh onions as well so i would recommend that you always have onion powder in your arsenal of spices because it does tend to just be the
Finishing touch on so many different dips and dressings so try to have some of that on hand okay um tapioca flour all right we’re gonna do about two teaspoons of this onion powder so it’s quite powdery it’s quite fluffy try not to breathe it in otherwise you’ll be
Sneezing so about two teaspoons of that one okay and then we’re going to need some nutritional yeast now depending on how kind of cheesy you want this flavor we’re going to start with about four tablespoons but know that you can add more of this if you want a little bit more cheesiness
To the flavor four tablespoons of that and then last but not least we’re going to need a bit of lemon juice and i like to put in a bit of white pepper now you might not it’s quite a spicy pepper okay you could use any kind you wanted but i
Just like about an eighth of a teaspoon so it’s just about a half a half of the quarter is an eighth so i just measured on the angle about an eighth of a teaspoon and a bit of lemon juice so normally in the average kind of juicy lemon
You’ll get about a tablespoon of juice out of each half or two tablespoons of juice out of a lemon so i like it a little bit lemony i’m gonna go for the full two tablespoons but you might just want to start with one and then have a taste check it
Do it again and there’s our roughly our tablespoon i’ll trust that that is okay where are we up to nev we omitted the yeast for intolerances and it was so delicious excellent good to hear yes you’re right it’s not a critical ingredient that one it’s just a different flavor profile so
Thank you for letting us know that that’s another option as well awesome and thanks for still watching the video even after you’ve already made it thanks neve that’s awesome okay so we’ve got our lemon juice and last but not least let’s put the onions in but if you want to have a
Little bit of extra texture to this i recommend only putting in say three quarters or maybe two thirds of the onions so that we can actually stir in the unblended onions after and still get that look of a french onion dip okay so here we have our caramelized onions
So they could have gone a little touch longer but this is definitely great so we’ve we’ve basically cooked out the really harsh intense onioniness of them if that makes sense and now they’re going to be nice and kind of a bit sweeter bit softer a bit yummier
Now you may need to add a little bit of water depending on your other ingredients depending on how long the cashews soaked so just know that you can add a bit of water or a bit of non-dairy milk to get this to blend properly but we want to make
Sure that you don’t add the water until you need it okay so let’s go over and blend this i’m going to bring a bit of water with me so that just in case i need it we can use it and i can’t wait for you to taste it come on back
Okay blend away Okay the moment of truth have a taste remember the recipe is just a guide you can tweak it how you want okay so is it oniony enough does it need an extra pinch of salt keeping in mind that usually a dip is going to be served with
A dipper so therefore we need to be stronger when we taste it on its own it normally needs to have more punch so that by the time you dip it with something it still tastes really good so for my personal palette that needs a little bit more salt
But that’s okay i’m going to leave it as is i like the balance with the nutritional yeast we’ve got enough lemon in there some of you may even tweak it up every now and then and add in a bunch of roasted garlic that’s another nice addition to the to
The dip you might even change it up all together and one day add some roasted beetroot and also you’ve got a pink french onion dip okay so you have options but i’m going to call that good and then once we get into the bowl we’re just going to stir in those extra onions
Here we go it’s fun making a big mess in the kitchen isn’t it especially when you have the rule in your household that the cook doesn’t clean okay so there is our french onion dip hopefully enough to last us at least a couple of days in the fridge
For all different types of uses i’ve even used this as a pizza base guys and it works amazing it’s a delicious pizza base and then we want to stir in some of those fresh onions so that we get that texture throughout or you could just serve them on top completely up to you
But there we have it so you’re whole food based real good quality no sacrifices french onion dip without a packet tada i hope you guys like it neve said she liked it which is good i’ll uh i’ll take that as a good thing already that one person does thank you
Uh okay so guys now uh our chips are not going to be done in the oven just yet and i’m realizing we’re already kind of a little bit over the usual hour i like to stick to so i will have a quick peek at them and see how they’re going
But probably we’re going to need to leave them in the oven to do their final crisping up okay so just know that from this point there’s a couple of tricks i can give you when it comes to the oven remember that the top of the oven is
Where they’re going to get the most crispy so we want to be able to rotate those trays so that they all get a chance under the top heat the other trick is that some ovens tend to hold a lot more moisture than others so if your oven is designed to have a
Really good seal and you’re not getting crispy fries then you might need to take something like something that’s heat safe so this is like a little silicon pot holder grabber and sometimes i use that when i want to dehydrate something or dry something out in the oven
I just kind of prop the oven door open with it now you know not 100 super the safest thing in the entire world because everything above here is going to heat up so be aware of that okay but at least now we can get the moisture out of the oven and the chips
Are going to crisp up so this is a trick you can use whenever you’re making anything that you want to be crispy in an oven that’s designed to hold the moisture all right [Applause] all right so as you can see now there’s no sign of browning there’s no it’s not fully cooked yet
Okay so ideally what i would do at this stage is i would do a rotation of the trays and maybe halfway through you might actually want to take a flipper and toss them around a bit to give them a different side up okay but instead of having some
Pre-cooked in advance i didn’t do that tonight so i’m going to let you be very brave and be very strong and know that those are going to be done in about another 15 or so minutes and you’re going to have your i guess your knowledge and your skills now to be able
To crisp them up on your own and then dip them away in your french onion dip now before we go i’ve got a couple other things i wanted to talk about so uh the other things you might be saying okay was this gonna be your whole dinner tonight like is this just all
You’re eating for dinner well for the sake of time and for the sake of what we’re doing tonight probably but i’ll probably have a little bit of fresh cucumber with it and normally i wouldn’t have this as a standalone meal however it’s not the end of the world
Guys if every now and then you have a slightly lighter dinner and you just decide to have some homemade veggie chips with a little bit of whole food french onion dip in it so do not freak out it’s not the end of the world if that’s all the kids end up
Having tonight at least you’ve got quite a bit of i guess whole food ingredients into them hopefully a lot of new vegetables that you hid under the nice crispy coating and with a dip maybe they’re eating cassava root and they had no idea they’re eating cassava
Root which i think is a bit of a win the other thing i want to say is next week please join us i’ve got a very special cook with me coming up it’s going to be my birthday so we’ve got something some special surprises
In store so i want to have you on next week’s cook with me i’m going to save i’m going to say nothing more i’m going to save it as a surprise and we’ll see you next week guys on cook with me in the meantime thank you so
Much for being on tonight making crispy fries and french onion dip with me would love to continue to have your comments your interaction your feedback on how these things are going for you in your family and in your kitchen and we will see you next time on cook with me live
Thanks guys good night