Spring things: Runner beans, stuff on muffins, and vegan Cherry Garcia

I'm about two weeks away from (hopefully) my last exams. If all goes well, this September I'll be at university and I'll have spent a whole summer enjoying remembering just what I did before I had to spend all my free time either working or studying.

The first thing I think I'll do is spend a lot more time reading, seeing friends, and cooking. I love cooking. I mean, I write a blog about what I ate for dinner, that's how much I like cooking. All those things I bookmarked and tore out of magazines to cook, I might finally get around to making. In the meantime, here's a few spring-like delights.

More stuff on muffins again. I might get the blog sponsored my Sainbury's basics muffins or get a muffin tattooed on my neck or something. Turns out most things go well on muffins - some avocado, some spinach, some asparagus, and some cheesy cashew sauce.

More asparagus and muffins for another late weekend breakfast - this time with a lot of miso marinated mushrooms. Underneath, a few spears of asparagus, grated carrot, leaves, and spring onions and sesame on top. I keep making these miso marinated mushrooms whenever I run out of ideas. I guess my brain is too full of science revision to think up anything clever to eat.

I did manage to remember why I like runner beans - that's something of an achievement. Albeit, a really small achievement, but still. 

I got a big load of runner beans in my vegbox recently and wasn't too sure what to with them. I remember my granny always served them up with Sunday roasts, and I liked them then. I bought them again on whim last summer, and forgot to take the strings out. I made some loubia with them and had to chuck it all away because eating the stringy beans was like flossing my teeth with a vegetable.

This time around, I remembered to de-string the beans. I thought they might like some beany company from butter beans and some of this 'revved up runner beans' sauce. I like the sauce, but if I was making it again, I think I'd add a bit of paprika. Everything tastes better with paprika, right?

A less successful attempt to recreate a childhood dish was this go at bread pudding: 

Bread pudding is a great dish. Whoever came up with the idea of putting milk and sugar into bread and baking it was a genius - what a great way to use up leftovers and get a sweet treat at the same time.

I think bread pudding started to go wrong when I used sourdough instead of normal bread, and figs instead of sultanas. Oh, and I put some brandy in there. I'm not sure why. I really should start up a section of this blog called 'things I tried to make and it sort of worked but mostly didn't'.

It was bit wet, and the spices could contend with the sourdough's tang. After conquering the runner beans, I'm pretty sure I should give bread pudding another go in the near future.

In the meantime, I'm mostly eating this:

I love that stuff. It's homemade ice cream of sorts. I really like getting the ice cream maker out, warming coconut milk with something and all the rest of it, but sometimes, all I've got is the energy to stick a frozen banana in the blender.

Thanks to some clever soul out there in blogworld (whoever you are, kisses to you) I worked out that putting some frozen cherries in with the banana along with some choc chunks gives you a vegan Cherry Garcia. Spring has been here long enough that I'm already thinking of summer and when I get to eat this All. Day. Long.