Red wine flavoured moussaka in baked potatoes!

Laurence my new flatmate is planning to have her own French Restaurant in Belgium and she really is an excellent cook, she's very inspiring and her creativity fuels mine! So tonight after my run I was thinking about what I could make that would be super easy, super tasty, and slow cooking because I felt like researching vegan gluten free cake recipes at the same time.

Sorry but I am a bit of a story teller so will get to the point. Baked potatoes are so easy to cook and a great source to get your daily vitamin C intake as well as Vitamin B6, fiber and all sorts of others (it's on the worlds healthiest food list - http://www.whfoods.com/foodstoc.php this is my bible seriously it's amazing) - so I grabbed the 4 biggest potatoes I could find, cut them in half so that each half was the thinnest possible (cooks easier), lightly greased an oven tray and placed the potatoes face down and popped them in the oven at 200 degrees.

I proceeded to research some cake recipies and found a few good ones, I'm looking forward to trying out this Chocolate Mocha cake although I would like to gluten free inise it... I'm yet to learn how to effectively gluten free baking recipies. Veganising baking recipies is so easy, I mean think of all the alternatives to butter - canola oil, olive oil, stewed apples (this is what I use very time now) and the list goes on. For eggs I use ground flaxseeds and water (1 egg = 1 Tbsp flaxseeds + 3 Tbsps water) its super easy and flaxseeds are so healthy they go excellent in muffins.

However, gluten freeing recipies is going to be a challenge, I majorly failed trying to make gluten free wraps in the summer. I figured I could just replace 1 cup of white flour with 1/2 cup of chick pea flour and 1/2cup of almond flour - it seemed too easy and it just didn't work, it turned into a grainy, oily bird feed type mixture that didn't bind and certainly wasn't going to let me roll it into wraps.

Back to the moussaka, so I finely chopped an onion, sauteed it in a pan on the lowest heat in olive oil (it's not good to cook olive oil at high temperatures -(http://www.whfoods.com/genpage.php?tname=george&dbid=56), I then grated and finely chopped an organic carrot into tiny cubes and threw that in the pan mixed in with the sauteed onion. Next I finely chopped the organic broccoli florets eating the raw stems cause I love them, I added this to the pan with the tin of pre soaked lentils.

I let this cook for a while on a low heat then added some finely chopped fresh tomatoes and mixed this in with some salt and pepper. I found some left over red wine from our BYO dinner on Sat night "Old Cocah Road Merlot Cabernet" and poured in just under 1/4 of a cup, I let the entire mixture simmer for about half an hour perhaps a little longer and at the end I added a few Tbsps of tomato paste to thicken it up a little.

During this whole process I turned the potatoes over 4 times to try and bake them evenly and once I was satisfied I scooped out the middles and spooned in the cooked moussaka. As I'm still of the student mindset I didn't want to just through away perfectly good potato - so I ate the scooped out bits with some moussaka on the side from the lovely looking stuffed potato! They key when cooking for me is to taste it regularly and cook to your tastes, and don't be afraid to add more of something, in small quanities you can't go wrong!

Bon Appetit!