Vegetation

Sadly...

2008-09-26T17:23:00.006+10:00

I am moving. I'm not going very far but for some reason too many things with this blog have died and won't work. I was going to move to wordpress but it seems to hate me much more than blogspot does so I'm taking my chances with another blogger blog for now. I hate to do this because I only have a small group of readers as is but I hope to see you all over there :) I'll be leaving this blog here though with a link to my recipe index because it's more trouble than it's worth to move it all across plus I kind of still like my little blog and I'm sad to leave it behind completely. If you want my recipe index for this blog you can find it here.

Vegetation xxx

Edit March 2009: I seem to have managed to upload a template that has a search function (woo hoo! And argh! Why didn't that work before I made a whole other blog!). Feel free to search for anything you're looking for now!

My Love Affair with Spinach..

2008-09-17T17:35:00.002+10:00

well mostly spinach anyway. Even though I don't always eat blogworthy food I do take photos. Anyway, I noticed a pattern emerging in the last week and a bit.

Sautee'd silverbeet (chard, swiss chard) on top of rice and millet pasta and topped with Esme's Special Sauce:

Sautee'd spinach with Joni from Just the Food's Garlicky Ranch Potato Patties:
Sautee'd Spinach with pine nuts I think, with canneloni (from a frozen box *blush*):
Veganomicons Sautee'd Spinach and Mushrooms with White Wine Sauce (I LOVE this dish and could eat it happily every single night, shown with Julies steamed seitan sausages):
Sautee'd spinach again with the addition of pine nuts and Vegan Yum Yums Bubble and Squeak Cakes (which were extremely delicious although more work than I was prepared for at the time but the kids ate white potato for the first time in years thanks to these):
And after all that greenery I just thought I'd share a photo of the beautiful flowers Mr UnVeg arrived home with for my birthday:
Finally I would like to say that for some reason my search function at the top has disappeared even though it is enabled. Likewise for my recipe index and blog list page links in the sidebar (which show up under my edit feature but for some reason not on my blog). I can't seem to fix it and have a solution but for now you can find it here.

For my birthday I learned...

2008-09-14T16:10:00.004+10:00

that I am NOT a cake maker!

The lessons learned were as follows:

#1. Don't throw out your pan before you move and forget that you did until you are ready to bake your cake, meaning you have to have an emergency trip to the local mall to get one.

#2. Don't stick your thumb in the cake with your oven mitt when getting it out of the oven, it will create a huge hole in your cake.

#3. Don't use your hand to balance the cake while trying to pry the bottom of the springform cake tin off the bottom of the cake because you forgot to put greaseproof paper down because of reason no 1, it will leave a hand print indent on the top of your cake.

#4. Don't prepare your frosting while the cake is still baking and then throw it in the fridge uncovered when visitors show up, especially not if you put strawberry oil in it, the strawberry oil won't beat back into the half solidified frosting.

#5. Don't for a second think you are able to pipe a perfect circle around a cake with 3 kids watching on. Can't and won't happen. Not for me anyway :P

#6. Put your cake on a plate before you frost it. Don't frost it while it's still on the rack, it will break into a billion pieces when you try to transfer it.

#7. Lucky last....despite all of the above the cake will taste awesome anyway and kids don't care what it looks like :P

(No, I have no plans for making cakes in the near future. I think I'll stick to cupcakes forever more, either that or I'll pay someone to make my cake for me!).

PS. One last lesson learned was that you can hide a multitude of sins with icing and semi okay cameramanship!

The Food I promised yesterday.

2008-09-07T17:48:00.007+10:00

Okay, I know I promised food, but I just had to share this. Yesterday at the beach there was the most adorable puppy ever. It's definitely moments meeting little cuties like these that remind me why I don't eat animals!

I'm sure the poor girl who's puppy it was thought I was quite mad asking her if I could have a photo of her puppy to put on the internets, but anyway, I did tell her she could go and tell her family about the crazy lady who was busy snapping photos of her dog.

This is Zeke:
You want one right? I know I do!

Yes, yes, I know, the food already! I made some chicken seitan the other week. My new obsession is taken from here, only I boil it because steaming it didn't work so well for me and I used Katies recipe from Don't Eat Off the Sidewalk II because I think I actually don't like beef style seitan, I've tried about a thousand and never liked any of them much:
(excuse the white bits, it's ice from the freezer not something weird!)

With it I made Jerk Seitan from VwaV. I made this once before just after going veg and while it wasn't awful I wasn't the hugest fan. Mr UnVeg was though (of the sauce that is) and loved it all over again. Me.....still kind of not such a fan.
I made a variation on this that I found at Happy Vegan Face (thanks Jessy!). I knew as soon as I saw it I had to have it. I left out the roasted garlic because I was running kind of late and I used paprika flakes instead of the chilli and I used cruddy peanut butter from the store with sugar and salt so I didn't put any sugar in it either. Last but not least I used coconut cream instead of the rice milk and heated it up in a small saucepan while I was cooking the broccoli.

And one more seitan dish (yes, I seem to be eating a lot of seitan lately!) with more peanutty goodness, this wrap. Only thing is I kind of misread it and thought that you wrapped the mix in lebanese bread wraps, not in lettuce. It was super filling and really yummy despite my apparently needing reading glasses! We'll definitely be having these again! (Thank you to Veggiegirl, I'm pretty sure I found it from a link on her blog!)

Happy Fathers Day!

2008-09-07T13:17:00.005+10:00

Today is Fathers Day in Australia (and other places, but I know some of you from across the ocean celebrate it on a different day to us). We were lucky. After 3 days straight of freezing and rain we awoke to sunshine, so we made the most of it and went to the beach. It's still too cold for swimming but it was nice to wander along. I have 4 major men in my life and was lucky enough to celebrate Fathers Day with 3.

The first is my husband, whom the girls just adore (and I would love to share a picture but I'm thingy about putting my kids on the internets in case you all couldn't tell already :P so you get a photo of him and myself instead, just imagine 3 unvegettes in the picture!). Heck who am I kidding! I adore him too :P:
The second of course is my own Dad who is just as loved as my husband:
And last but not least is my little brother who I wasn't lucky enough to get a photo of (it was suggested but I think we were too busy chatterboxing and they left before I realized we hadn't taken a photo, Hi Brendan! Lots of love!) and of course my Father In Law Shane who is just as wonderful to me as my Dad is.

So to all the Dads out there (and the Dads to be and the not Dads but might be Dads one day) I hope you had a wonderful day!

I have food, I will post it tomorrow :) See you then!

WHEW!

2008-09-01T08:00:00.005+10:00

I've done it again! Thought I had nothing to blog, then uploaded all my photos and realized there was a whole lot more than I thought! So, grab a cuppa, I might be a while :P

Before I start though, good thoughts for my fluffy boy Toby who has hurt his foot and has been limping around feeling sooky and sorry for himself for the last 24 hours (don't worry, he's being taken care of, he slept at our feet last night and has been to the vet). He's on anti inflammatories but if his foot isn't better in a week he has to go for x-rays to check for breaks that may have been missed ($$$~eek!, more importantly though, I want him to feel better).

Okay, onto the food part of things.

First up, Seitan Picatta from the Candle Cafe Cookbook, which was given to me by my Brother and Sister in law (thanks Dave and Andrea and hi!). I'm embarrassed to admit that I haven't blogged about it nearly enough! I do love it though. Excuse the not so hot photo, I had a disaster with my new cast iron griddle pan and set off the fire alarm (which is connected to the main house alarm......well you get the picture :P) Then I had to cook a whole new seitan cutlet and it wasn't cooking and everything else was going cold/soggy/burning/something else terrible. The sauce for this was amazing, J the youngest of the twins was practically drinking it off her plate.
If you don't have this book (and you should :P) there is a recipe in Veganomicon, but I've also made one in the past that was similar, here.

Vegan Queso from here. My friend Lauren introduced me to this. I love her and hate her at the same time for doing so. This stuff was SOOOO good. I ate it for dinner one night with corn chips *blush*. Mine is a lot more red than her picture, I think because I used Salsa instead of Ro-tel because I don't think we get that stuff here. Next time I'd leave out the salt when using salsa though, it was a teeny bit salty.
To make up for the above, we had stir fry. Generally I use fresh veggies but on a weeknight when it's getting late I have a back up of frozen broccoli, onion, water chestnuts (I am SO in love with water chestnuts) and bok choy. I add some fresh asian broccoli and bok choy to it because that little bit of fresh makes all the difference. I've eaten a lot of stir fry this week.

One with Hokkien noodles that the whole family ate:
And one just for me with thick fresh rice noodles (YUM), yes, that's tofu on the top. I decided to test my tolerance level. I ate only half of what you see there and was not feeling so hot so I don't think I'm going to be one of those lucky people who get over there allergy/intolerance, sigh.
One night I had chicken seitan with creamy mustard sauce (this isn't vegan but if you have mimicream or something it could be).

Creamy Mustard Sauce
1 Tbsp Margarine
Handfull of Shallots (about 1/4 cup)
300ml of Thickened Cream (check for gelatin!)
1 Tbsp of French or Dijon Mustard

Saute the shallots in the margarine until softened, add the cream and mustard and simmer until thickened. Serve over veggies (like cauliflower) or seitan.
With it we had crack salad. *Cough* I mean Celeriac Remoulade I've blogged about before. Recipe here.
And last but not least, 2 of my favourite new addictions. I've had Oat Milk before but it was always really sweet and really Oaty and not my favourite thing in the world. Anyway, Vitasoy have just brought one out and it is perfect! Creamy but not sweet, very light tasting and definitely my new favourite.
Second is these:
I was sent a sample pack of the cashew one in the mail. We've also tried the sunflower seed one but no one was a fan. The Cashew one however is a must try. You can buy them in the health food section at Woolies.

And if you've made it this far, bonus kitty pic. Charlotte was using the base of a tree in the backyard as a pillow the other day. I just had to take a photo, it looked incredibly........uncomfortable!

See you all soon :)

Fried Halloumi with Lime and Caper Dressing and Tomato Jam.

2008-08-25T15:03:00.002+10:00

I've been taking the easy way out with dinners lately and eating a lot of my old favourites. I have done some new cooking however none of it has been very blogworthy. It would seem that I am the only person on the planet who can kill a recipe from Veganomicon. From here on in, I will always remember to trust my instincts.

As most of you who follow my blog know, due to my IBS (and other reasons, one being that I am just a big chilli wimp), that I don't eat chilli. Well, I up and decide the other day that I will make Chocolate Chilli Mole with seitan and rice and maybe some veggies. Soooooo I spend hours making up spice mixes (okay I exaggerate, not hours but still...time) and getting everything together. I get to the bit where it says 2 tsp Cayenne Chilli Powder and hesitate. Should I sub it for Paprika like I always do or use the chilli? In the end I decide it IS chocolate chilli mole after all and put in half the chilli.

Too damn hot. Like I nearly choked to death kind of hot. I don't know how anyone on this earth could eat 2 tsp of Cayenne Chilli Powder in anything but I ended up trying to save it. In my quest to repair this fiery disaster I end up throwing in a whole jar (yes, you read that correctly) of peanut butter and an extra entire tin of tomatoes.

Still too hot so in the end, I'm sorry to say, there was no where else for it but the bin :(

The following meal however was good. I think the dressing could do with one less ingredient (I found it on recipe zaar somewhere), maybe the capers, as much as I love them, it was just a teeny bit too busy. But it was really good none the less. For those of you who are vegan, I can't guarantee it (because of the soy thing obviously) but I suspect it would be nice with some fried tofu instead of the Halloumi :)

Fried Halloumi Cheese with Lime and Caper Dressing

Serves 2-3

250g Halloumi Cheese
2 Tbsp Olive Oil
2-4 Tbsp Seasoned Flour

Dressing:
Juice and Zest of 1 Lime
1 Tbsp Capers, drained and chopped finely
1 Tbsp Verjuice or White Wine Vinegar
1 tsp Wholegrain Mustard
1 Tbsp fresh Coriander Leaves, chopped
2 Tbsp Extra Virgin Olive Oil
Salt and Freshly Ground Black Pepper

Mix all ingredients for dressing together in a small bowl.

Slice the Halloumi as desired, coat lightly in the seasoned flour and fry 1-2 minutes each side until browned and crisp.

Serve the dressing on a bed of couscous and top with Halloumi slices.

Yesterday I picked up a bag of tomatoes and decided to make tomato jam. It's good, but I added a touch too much ginger (if you google Tomato Jam if you want a recipe plenty come up, this one was basic, tomatoes, sugar and ginger boiled for about 25 minutes until dark and glossy then put into sterilized jars).

Mum has a wonderful recipe for me however that I'll be getting my grubby little hands on soon and once I have it I'll share (and trust me, it might sound strange but it's going to blow my Tomato Jam out of the water............well...I hope it will anyway :P)

Lolo's Tomato and Basil Cream Pasta.

2008-08-15T19:40:00.004+10:00

Soy free, easy and super delicious (and there were no complaints from Mr UnVeg either!). Gluten free too, I served it with Rice and Millet Pasta. Go try it! Linky.

And because it's a short one today, here's a bonus pic of a fluffy orange squirrel.....errr I mean kitty, getting his fill the minute I turned my back, little rascal!

All My Addictions....

2008-08-12T18:19:00.004+10:00

I admit it, every time I get a new comment I get addicted to a new blog. They were starting to take over my blog skin however so I decided to dedicate an enitre entry to them. Please visit some of these other great bloggers. I am sure you will be as addicted as I am in no time! I subscribe to each and every one of these and more. The ones I didn't include are solely because they haven't updated in 2 months or more, but if they start up again I shall add them back on :) Have fun!

A
AV Thompsons Weblog
Adventures in Urban Sustainability
Adventures in Vegetarianism
Alice in Veganland
Altered Plates
Apples and Twigs

B
Bigmouth Strikes Again
Bjorked Off
Bok Choy Bohemia

C
Cake Maker to the Stars
Chocolate Covered Vegan
Cindalous Healthy Gluten Free and Dairy Free Recipes
Coconut and Raspberry
Comfort Food Vegan
Cupcake Kitteh

D
Diet, Dessert and Dogs
Don't Eat Off the Sidewalk
Dreena's Vegan Recipes

E
Eat Me Delicious
Eat'n Veg'n Food and Recipes
Eden in the Kitchen
Every Day Dish
Fat Free Vegan Kitchen

F
Fun and Food Blog Recipes

G
Gluten Free Bay
Gluten Free Soy Free Vegan

H
Happy Herbivore
Happy Vegan Face
Have Cake Will Travel

I
Iron Chef Vegan

J
Julie's Kind Kitchen
Just the Food

K
Kamutflake Girl
Karina's Kitchen~Recipes from a Gluten Free Goddess
Kitchen Ramblings From a Fairly Odd Tofu Mom
Kurma News

L
Life on the Vegan Highway is Good
Love Like a Vegan
Luminous Vegans

M
Megan the Vegan
My Vegan Cookbook

P
Post Punk Kitchen Blog

R
Ruby Red Vegan

S
Scrumptiously Vegan
Seitan is my Motor
Semi Circular Vegan
So what do Vegetarians eat anyway?
Solusta
Soy Free Vegan

T
The Chocolate Peanut Butter Gallery
The Crispy Cook
The Reluctant Vegan
The Tropical Vegan
The Urban Vegan
The Vegan Mothers Blog

V
Vegan Dad
Veg Bitch
Vegalicious
Vegan Cookies
Vegan Family Dinners
Vegan Homemade
Vegan Lovlie Cooking
Vegan Planet
Vegan.com: Everything Vegan
Vegan Cowgirl
Vegans Rock!!
Vegan Yum Yum
Vegemommy
Veggie Meal Plans
Veggie Terrain
Veggie Girl

W
Walking the Vegan Line
Where's the Revolution

Y
Yellow Rose Recipes
Yummama

Chicken Seitan Wraps..

2008-08-11T12:04:00.003+10:00

Nothing amazingly special here, I've blogged them before somewhere, but this time I used Johanna's Chicken Seitan that I made the other day and dipped it in egg replacer made up with rice milk instead of water and crumbed it in a mixture of fresh Rye Grain Bread crumbs (done in the food processor) and some dry gluten free breadcrumbs I had in the pantry and needed to use up.
The coating was perfect and I wrapped it in a lebanese bread with avocado, tomato, lettuce, alfalfa sprouts and Tofu Moms Raw Cashew Ranch Dip. (Excuse the cruddy photo, I took a billion and this was as good as it got for some reason)
This stuff is pure heaven. Go make it...NOW!!! I used an extra teaspoon of Garlic Powder instead of fresh garlic because I can't handle fresh raw garlic but next time I'll make it 1 1/2 tsp and I used Verjuice instead of the ACV. This dip minus the dill would make an awesome base for some veggie mayo me thinks (I plan to do some experimenting soon).

Lemon and Caper Pasta Salad..

2008-08-08T12:46:00.003+10:00

Yesterday I felt like pasta. But I wanted quick, I wanted easy and I wanted it to taste good, not jarred sauce thrown over hot pasta. So I went to one of my favourite websites (because there are pics! But be warned, it's not vegan in any way, shape or form) and came across this recipe. It sounded good. I went for the dairy version mostly because I was for once feeding the whole family and most of them (I'm looking at you Mr Unveg, with my evil non veggie spotting eye) complain about anything that's remotely "weird".

I didn't of course tell Mr Unveg until he'd polished off every last bite that it contained capers and he was rather horrified once I told him (so horrified in fact, I suspect he chose not to believe me!) however it was too late by then. He'd already told me it was tasty, filling and delicious :P

For those who are vegan if you add some lemon juice to soy milk and use soy sour cream it's easily veganized and for those who are gluten/wheat free I used Rice and Millet Pasta and no one in the family commented at all so I'm thinking they didn't notice :P

The only thing I changed was the fact that I used a little extra buttermilk, an extra tablespoon of sour cream. And because I love capers so much, a whole 2 super heaping tablespoons of those!

This was so good I reheated what little leftovers we had for lunch today. Serve it topped with parmesan cheese if you wish.

Beef and Red Wine Casserole.

2008-08-05T11:41:00.002+10:00

I've been doing some experimenting with seitan lately.

First I made this seitan. It didn't work out super well for me. It didn't seem to cook, but it did at the same time and the texture was massively creepy. The taste however was good, so I poured a couple of cups of beef style stock into a baking dish and baked them for an extra 40 minutes, which helped a lot with the texture. They're still really meaty though, much more so than any other seitan I've made before. I haven't decided if that's a good thing or a bad thing yet :P

Yesterday I made some of Johanna's setian from here. It was really quick and easy and I made a few small changes. I went the chickpea flour option only I ran out so used 1/8 cup chickpea flour and 1/8 cup rye flour. I left out the onion powder but added a teaspoon of paprika and I also threw in almost 1/2 a teaspoon of garlic powder and left the fresh garlic out of the wet ingredients. Last but not least I used chicken style broth instead of water or veggie broth.
It came out of the oven smelling delicious and tastes amazing too and for the first time in ever I didn't have seitan explosion in my oven.

So, what to do with some of this seitan. Being the end of winter I wanted to get in another casserole so I did some googling and decided on Beef and Red Wine Casserole (because I made a meaty version a while back for Mr Un-Veg and meat smell aside, it smelled great!).

It came out well, thankfully the seitan softened up quite a bit while cooking rendering it slightly less creepy.

Beef Seitan and Red Wine Casserole

1/2 Onion, chopped (I didn't put this in but it would be heaps better with it in)
1 clove Garlic, minced
1 Tbsp Olive Oil or spray if preferred
Small amount of Water
350g Beef Style Seitan, chopped or chunked
2 Dsp Flour (plain, wholemeal, I used a rye/gluten free combination)
350-400g Mushrooms, sliced thickly (or more if you're a real mushie fiend like me!)
1/2 cup Red Wine
3/4 cup Beef Style Stock
1/2 tin Crushed Tomatoes
1 1/2 medium Carrots, sliced in half lengthwise and then sliced on the diagonal
1 fairly long sprig fresh Rosemary

Heat the oil or oil spray in a non stick frying pan and fry the onion until it softens. Add the garlic and fry about another minute. Throw into slow cooker.

Heat a small amount of oil again in the frying pan and cook seitan, stirring for about 5 minutes or until it starts to brown a bit. Add the flour (make the dessert spoons heaped if possible). Cook for another minute or so, adding a sploosh (thanks for that word GG, I love it!) of water if needed to keep the mix moist.

Throw this into the slow cooker along with the stock, red wine, rosemary, tomatoes, mushrooms and carrots. Set cooker to low and cook for about 4-6 hours depending on your cooker and serve with hot mashed potatoes.

(Note, I didn't do it but I think throwing in a tablespoon or so of tomato paste would make a richer and nicer gravy).

Makes approximately 2 large servings.

2008-07-29T16:37:00.003+10:00

I know, I know! I've been slack again. Sometimes I get disheartened and sad about all the things I can't eat and the things I refuse to eat and it ends up feeling like there's just not much to eat at all!

On top of that, I've been having more testing done. After finding out my Aunt has thyroid problems and so does one of her daughters and them finding out that it runs in the family I decided, given my health problems, that a check up might be necessary. All came back normal however (as usual) aside from my iron levels being slightly down again (nothing new there, they're still higher now than they ever were when I was omni).

But anyway. Food. That's why you're here!

I did some more gluten free experimenting. None successful!

I made some Blueberry Lemon Muffins that were rather heavy and the taste wasn't so great. Although it was maybe partially me, Mr Unveg said they were allright and 2 of the 3 Unvegettes said they were great.
I tried a recipe for gluten free brownies. Unfortunately I had no Barley flour so I got it into my head that grinding Pearl Barley in the coffee grinder might work....yeah...not so much. My brownies came out like chocolate flavoured grit spackled concrete (although when heated up Mr Unveg, the Unvegettes and my Unvegerific Dad all polished them off rather quickly).
I spent the other day making up some wheat free flours (and some gluten free flours) which I will blog about once I have used (and hopefully they will work!) Otherwise, I'm feeling a little disheartened with gluten free baking for now.

On the positive side, I found this article, which gives me hope that one day, us soy free folk, may just have a chance at some tofu or soy milk! (I know I have blogged an article before about them being able to remove the allgergenic component of the soy bean to create allergy free soy but this is different!)

On the dinner side of things there's been a couple of new recipes, but none were blog worthy and some were downright scary, but I finally got my rear end in order and decided to make something yummy. I have been wanting to try the Leek and Bean Cassoulette from Veganomicon pretty much since I got the book, but given my digestive problems with beans couldn't decide what to make. Then browsing through a magazine the other day in search of Unvegful ideas for the Unveg family, I came across a turkey and leek casserole with dumplings (the Aussie name for what I suspect Americans call biscuits~oh and blech but anyway) and got an idea. I would attempt this casserole with some minor changes to eliminate the beans and the green peas (cannot make myself eat green peas, no matter how many times I try or what I do with them!) and so I made Chicken Seitan Cassoulette with Biscuits.
The girls ate all the biscuits off the top and deemed the filling not so great, but I liked it, although I think I used just a little bit too much seitan and if I make it again I'll use a little less and bump up the veggie content.

I was a little put off making this because I'd read it was a fair bit of trouble but I found it fairly easy once all the chopping was done (but I prepare almost everything I eat from scratch these days so maybe my perspective is slightly skewed. I wouldn't want to be making it after a long day at work, that's for sure!)

Wheat Free Failure......

2008-07-21T16:03:00.004+10:00

So as I said a few weeks ago, the plan was to cut out wheat. Well I fail. Totally. Well, no, that's not quite true either. I half fail? For the most part I am managing.

Except the other day I found my tin of Jackfruit in the pantry and decided it was time to stop being scared of it and make the pulled pork sandwiches that went around the PPK a while back (excuse the flash, winter, dark, white food, blahdy blah) and I just HAD to have it on a wheat roll (well okay, I didn't have to, but I really really wanted to, is that the same?):
It was okay. I'm not a huge fan of bbq sauce and it was soft, it looked like shredded meat but the texture was wrong. I pretty much opened a tin of green young jackfruit in water (it has to be the green stuff, if it's ripe and in syrup it won't work) and simmered it in water for about 2 hours until it started to shred. Then I helped it along with my fingers, poured in a bunch of bbq sauce and heated it up in a saucepan and poured it on the roll. I probably won't bother to make it again, but I'm glad I tried it once.

On top was Celery Remoulade which I saw on another blog linked from the PPK but which I cannot find now (so if it was yours tell me so I can fix that problem!). I did a bit of googling and found 2 main contenders. This one was the one from veganyumyum. I loved it and so did my (omniverous) Dad.

It was a teeny tiny bit too mustardy though (and I'm a mustard lover). Next time around I based it off this recipe. I shredded the celeriac finer, used 2 Tbsp of Mustard instead of the 1/4 cup and I also used half mayonnaise, half sour cream (but I think I liked it better with all mayo) and last but not least I used Verjuice instead of the vinegar, just because acidy stuff doesn't always sit so well with me. I like it better with the larger shreds to be honest. This is going to be a definite summer time favourite (too bad about the fat content however, sigh).
Today I got organized early and prepped for the Almost All American Pot Pie from Veganomicon. My kitchen smelled heavenly for hours after making the filling, although I had to add more liquid because for some reason my gravy kept disappearing (and even with extra liquid it doesn't look very gravyish but anyway, maybe it was because I halved the recipe). This isn't wheat free either (damn delicious crust!):
and of course..the money shot:
Oh! This was seriously the best thing I've eaten in weeks (I think!) and even Miss Unveggette (K my 9 year old) ate up 2 servings (she's in a "I wanna be a vegetarian phase after seeing Babe 1 and 2 this week).

I tried to redeem myself with the gluten/wheat this week, however. I baked Celines Gluten Free Fudgy Brownies (yum yum! And the best bit? They're totally healthy..you know...cause they have sweet potato in them and stuff.....sorry about the photo though, we were down to the last 2 little pieces when I realized no photos had been taken and they were melting my ice cream and it was about 9pm so it had to be a quick flash photo!):
I made Celines Crispy Seitan Bacon again (minus the charcoal. Ohhhhhh sooooo gooood) and had it with rice fettucine and Tofu Moms cashew alfredo sauce cooked my way from here (let there be no mistake about it, this pasta was good, but completely devoid of any nutritional content what so ever so not something I'd eat every day...white rice flour, potato starch and a bit of water from memory!):
And I made some cookies, loosely based on Terry's Oatmeal Raisin Cookies from Veganomicon. Mine however were
Choc Chip Quinoa Cookies

1/4 cup Grape Seed (or other mild) Oil
1/6 cup (or 2 Tbsp plus 1 tsp) Brown Rice Syrup
1/6 cup Rice Milk
1/4 plus 1/8 cup Brown Sugar
1/2 tsp Vanilla Extract
1 cup Gluten Free Flour
1/6 cup (again 2 Tbsp plus 1 tsp) Vanilla Almond Meal (or regular would work too)
1/2 tsp Baking Soda
1/4 tsp Baking Powder
1 1/2 tsp Ground Cinnamon
1/2 tsp Ground Nutmeg
1/2 tsp Allspice
1/4 tsp Salt
3/4 cup Quinoa Flakes
1/2 cup Chocolate Chips

Preheat the oven to 150C and lightly oil a cookie sheet.

In a large bowl combine the rice syrup, oil, milk, sugar, vanilla and beat until smooth. Sift in the flour, almond meal, baking powder and soda and add the spices. Stir unti combined and fold in the quinoa flakes and chocolate chips.

Take a small bowl and fill it with warm water. Dip your tablespoon measuring spoon into the water, scoop out roughly a tablespoon of cookie dough, roll it and put it on the tray (don't bother to squash it flat, although I guess you can if you want). Repeat with remaining dough (the dough is also a little easier to work with if you leave it in the fridge for about half an hour before using).

Cook for 8-12 minutes depending on how you like your cookies.

I did some for 8 minutes, some for 10 and some for nearly 15, it didn't make a whole lot of difference the next day, some were firmer.

Please not that these are somewhat of a cakey biscuit but they melt in your mouth and were liked by the kids and both my parents (and Mum NEVER eats cookies or sweets).

Makes about 14 cookies.

I Am Spam...

2008-07-11T18:05:00.006+10:00

Yes, you read that correctly. I am spam.

If you have a blog and you are in my list at the left then I just want to say I am there reading faithfully every day (and if you're not I've either not found you yet or I have added you since I last updated my list)! It seems that particularly with wordpress that I cannot leave comments. I try, it doesn't show up but if I try to re-submit the comment it tells me I already said that.

Either that or it tells me to log into blogger (even though I am already logged in) and then tells me that I don't exist (ahem, I appear to exist to me thank you very much!).

I've written to a couple of you about it but Celine was the one who happened to notice that some of my comments at least, were going to her spam box, ugh.

Anyway, just wanted to say I'm there reading, but can't comment :(

I do wonder however if I have something weird going on with my blog. I had someone do a strange search for some kind of trojan or worm or something and it sent that person to a comment on my blog through google. Maybe I'm just suspicious but it seemed strange.

Anyway, onto food! I've been on a real spinach binge lately, eating it pretty much every day for the last week. This one was baby spinach sauteed in a non stick pan with a bit of olive oil, garlic and some pine nuts (you can't see them for some reason) stolen off a Gordon Ramsay show I was watching (heh, yes Gordon, the dreaded vegetarians watch you too!). It was supposed to also have a little chilli but I don't eat chilli so left it out. I served it with a White Bean and Sage cutlet, creamy mashed potatoes and I think there was some baby corn hiding in between the spinach and potato. This is our new favourite way to eat spinach, even Mr Unveg gave it the omni tick of approval.
One night I had Puttanesca sauce on polenta. I wasn't keen on this. I don't know what I did to my polenta but it was like orange rubber! I still love the sauce but I'll stick to having it with quinoa and pasta!
Another night we had mixture on toast (which I've blogged about before). I used Celines crispy seitan bacon. I sadly burned it (my fault) but it was delicious all the same (even the bits of charcoal were like delicious bacon-ey charcoal). It's definitely going to be a favourite around here. I made some more for tonights dinner....sans charcoal. I'll confess, this has dairy cheese on it, not vegan cheese. Basically, toast your toast, scrape it with vegemite, top with tomato slices and cheese and grill until the cheese melts. Top that with bacon slices and some fresh mixed lettuce. Great for lunch or an easy dinner and delicious too (although it sounds somewhat scary).
I deglutanized some Banana Oatmeal Muffins. They were good. But not great, they were a little on the heavy side which I'm finding is pretty common with my gluten free baked goods (still not sure what I'm doing wrong). I want to fiddle a bit more before I share. Here's a pic anyway :P

Risotto Madness...

2008-07-11T16:15:00.005+10:00

Since discovering I could make awesome risottos in my rice cooker with minimal stirring (lazy cook, remember :P) I have been absolutely addicted! They are super easy, super yummy and the best bit....super easy and they're ready in just half an hour (give or take 5 minutes, once again excuse the flash, winter, dark, blahdy blah):
First up is Green Risotto adapted for the rice cooker from "Rices and Risottos"

2 Tbsp Olive Oil
1 Onion, finely chopped
1 1/2 cups Aborio (Risotto) Rice
4 cups Chicken Style Stock
75ml White Wine
400g Baby Spinach
1 Tbsp chopped fresh Basil
1 tsp chopped fresh Mint
4 Tbsp Parmesan Cheese, finely grated (optional of course!)

Set your rice cooker to the cook setting and heat the oil. Fry the onion until it begins to soften then add the rice and stir to coat it. Add the stock and wine, put the lid on and let the rice cook for 10 minutes. After 10 minutes stir in the baby spinach, replace the lid and allow to cook for a further 10 minutes.

Stir in the fresh herbs and cheese if using and allow to sit for 10 final minutes on the warm setting of your rice cooker.

Stir, serve and enjoy (I had mine with a chickpea cutlet and steamed baby corn).

Serves 4 as a side dish.

Then a number of nights later (because I am slack with my blogging) I made some Roasted Fennel Risotto, taken from here with a minor change, I gently fried the fennel first rather than roasting it.
Fennel Risotto

1 Onion, finely chopped
2 cloves Garlic, minced
1 glass of White Wine
280g Aborio (Risotto) Rice
Pinch of Saffron
1 Ltire (4 cups) Vegetable Stock
Salt and Pepper
1 bulb Fennel, trimmed and chopped
1 tsp Ground Fennel or Fennel Seeds (I didn't have the seeds so I used ground)
1 tsp dried Tarragon
1/2 tsp dried Dill

Heat the rice cooker on the cook position, add the oil and gently fry the onion and fennel until it starts to soften. Add the garlic and cook about 1 more minute.

Add the rice and stir to coat. Add stock, wine, saffron, fennel seeds (or ground fennel), tarragon and dill. Season with salt and pepper, stir well, place lid on cooker and cook for 10 minutes.

Stir, cook a further 10 minutes, stir once more and let sit for a final 10 minutes on the warm setting and serve.

Serves 4 as a side dish.

Once again (as you can tell) I had it with a chickpea cutlet (I've also been on a cutlet bender recently :P) and no, I didn't drink that glass of wine, it was leftover from the cooking but it made me feel sophisticated to pretend I was going to have it with dinner!

Cookies, Dip and Cheeze.

2008-07-04T12:18:00.006+10:00

I have been so unbearably slack with my blog. I just seemed to lose steam the last couple of months and the excitement I felt combined with being busy, tired and uninspiredmade me lazy and I have been relying heavily on easy favourites such as:

Rice Pasta Shells with Coriander Pesto (my latest addiction) and baked eggplant slices. I ate this like 3 times in a week, then got really sick of it...temporary I'm sure!
I had some of the leftover Spinach and Fennel Soup which was just as good 2nd time round. This time I made wheat free (but not gluten free) biscuits using 1/2 Rye Flour and 1/2 gluten free flour. This worked really well. They puffed up deliciously.
And last but not least, Lolo's Italian Rice and Beans with extra Balsamic, semi dried tomatoes, white rice instead of brown (because beans and brown rice is just too much fibre at once for my system or something) and a splash of vegan worcestireshire . Oh and red kidney beans instead of great northern. I will never tire of Lolo's Rice and Bean dishes. Initially I liked the Lemon Tahini one better but I think this just came in as my favourite (but it could be because I always eat the Lemon Tahini one!)
So for those of you who have perservered with reading what little I have posted a really big thankyou :)

Today it was raining and in a bid to get my experimentative (what? I have warned you on several occasions I like to make words up :P) chefs hat back on my head I headed into the kitchen. I had forgotten how much fun experimenting can be when something comes out right. There's nothing like repeating disasters over and over to turn you off even trying anything new.

So I went through my gigantic list of things I want to make (usually found on the internet, most of them belong to you dear bloggers :D) and decided to de-glutanize (did I make that one up too?) some White Chocolate Macadamia Cookies I found on Baking Bites. I'll repost the recipe only because I made a couple of changes, but go take a peek, there are some serious yummies over there!

I will say that I used Orgran All Purpose Flour which has Gluten Free Gluten (scroll down) incorporated into it. If you can't get this I recommend adding about 1 tsp of Xanthan Gum to the mix (or your favourite "gluten replacer").
White Chocolate Macadamia Nut Cookies

3/4 cup All Purpose Gluten Free Flour
1/4 cup Almond Meal 1 tsp Baking Powder (gluten free)
1/2 tsp Baking Soda
1/4 tsp Salt
1/4 cup White Sugar
1/8 cup Macadamia Nut Butter (*edited don't use all oil, use almond butter if you don't have macadamia butter, oil makes them too oily and they burn)
1/8 cup mild tasting Oil
1/3 cup Maple Syrup
1 tsp Vanilla Extract or Vanilla Bean Paste
1/4 cup Macadamia Nuts, chopped fairly fine (but you still want chunks!)
1/3 cup White Chocolate Chips (I used dairy because I couldn't find vegan soy free ones but if you can use those!)

In a medium/large bowl sift together the flour, almond meal, baking powder, baking soda, salt and sugar.

In a smaller bowl whisk together the macadamia nut butter, oil, maple syrup and vanilla.

Stir the wet ingredients into the dry until just mixed. Fold through macadamia nuts and white chocolate chips and if possible refrigerate for an hour to firm the mix up (it works if you don't but it's much easier to handle if you do).

Preheat oven to 150 degrees C. Spray a cookie sheet with non stick spray and using a wet tablespoon plop or roll tablespoon sized balls of cookie dough onto the prepared cookie sheet. Bake for 10 minutes for a chewy cookie (I'm guessing 15-18 for crispy but I didn't try that because I like mine chewy) or until set on top.

Cool on tray for 4-5 minutes before carefully removing to a rack to cool completely with a spatula (be careful, these are a little crumbly).

Try not to eat them all :P

Notes: *I can't tell that these are gluten free, but it's been nearly a month since I ate wheat so maybe I've just forgotten what cookies are like, either way, they're delicious!

*From what I have read you should bake gluten free goods at 150C and bake them for longer otherwise you end up with a crunchy inedible cookie/cake/muffin. I had the temp at 140 because I used my toaster oven which you are supposed to reduce by 20-30 degrees anyway. Just keep an eye on them.

While I was baking the cookie and staring through the glass front of the toaster oven like a hawk I decided to be constructive and made some rice cheese. I have had the recipe since about week 4 of going vegetarian but kept putting it off. I won't add a photo because for some reason the agar didn't gel it properly and it's more like a soft pate' than a solid block :P If you want to try it though:

Rice Cheese

1 cup Nutritional Yeast Flakes
2 Tbsp Tahini (I had to use almond butter on account of the fact I found a drowned fly in my tahini upon opening. EWWWWWWWWWW!)
1 Tbsp Lemon Juice
1 tsp Salt
1/2 tsp Yellow Mustard
1/4 cup Margarine or Oil
1/2 tsp Onion Granules
1/4 tsp Garlic Granules
1/2 cup Rice Milk
1/4 cup Rice Milk Powder (I used Rice Flour, I can't get rice milk powder)
1 cup cooked Rice
1 1/2 cups Water
8 Tbsp Agar Flakes (here's where I likely went wrong, I only had powder so halved the amount)

Spray a small container with oil spray.

Put everything except the agar and the water into a blender and blend until smooth (this was impossible, the mixture was too thick).

Put the water and agar into a saucepan and bring to a boil. Reduce the heat to med-low and simmer, stirring constantly, until agar has dissolved.

Pour the agar into the blender and blend the mixture until smooth, scraping down sides often (I couldn't get it 100% smooth, there were teensy rice chunks).

Pour mixture into prepared container and place uncovered in fridge to firm up. Once firm, cover. Chill for several hours before serving.

Keep refrigerated or freeze. Partially thaw frozen cheese to slice it.

It will keep approximately 10 days in the fridge.

Last but not least in a bid to stop neglecting Veganomicon I made the Curried Carrot Dip. I bought a 1kg bag of carrots the other day from the market for a mere $1.60. This dip is DELICIOUS! And I can tell already it's going to become a staple in my fridge! I really should try out the dips and spreads more often, for some odd reason that even I don't know I tend to shy away from dips and spreads.
Look at that brilliant colour!

Vegalicious Spinach and Fennel Soup and Gluten Free Biscuits.

2008-06-25T14:47:00.002+10:00

Now, for those of you who have been reading for a while, you know that I am an absolute soup hater. I've tried a billion soups, canned, packet, home made, bought home made style and I've never really liked any of them.

But for some reason, Chris always makes me feel like soup and when I saw this one the other day I just knew I had to try it despite my loathing of soup. Besides, fennel is good for digestion and bad tummies and I love spinach so I at least had to like this, right?

Wrong.

I LOVED it! My photo isn't nearly as pretty as Chris's at Vegalicious but I'll post it up here anyway (the sun needs to stop setting at 4:40 in the afternoon :P)
I used dairy yoghurt for the soy because I had some in the fridge and because I can't have soy and I have run out of cashews until pay day (at $20 a bag, they have to wait for dicount day) but next time I'll make it with a dollop of cashew cream with lemon juice.

With it I made some gluten free biscuits, just subbing some gluten free all purpose flour for the wheat flour and used the recipe from VwaV. Gluten free flour doesn't rise as high or get quite as fluffy as wheat flour, or maybe I did something wrong...they were still delicious though and the kids munched down all the ones I didn't eat so they can't have been too bad :P

Veggie Rolls.

2008-06-24T12:34:00.005+10:00

In my previous blog post I said I was trying something and luckily it turned out pretty yummy! Even the kids liked it (well one of them did, the other 2 ate the pastry and picked out the middle :P)

Veggie Rolls~adapted from a recipe from Super Food Ideas

1 Red Onion, halved
2 medium Carrots, peeled
2 small Zucchini, trimmed
2 cloves Garlic, minced
1 Tbsp Oil of choice
1 Corn Cob, kernals removed
1 cup Sweet Potato (or plain potato would work too, maybe even pumpkin), cooked and mashed
1 1/2 cups Quick Cooking Rolled Oats
1/4 tsp dried Thyme
1/4 tsp dried Majoram
1/2 tsp dried Basil
1/2 tsp dried Oregano
1/2 tsp dried Sage
3 tsp Hot Chilli, Tomato or BBQ Sauce
2 Egg Replacers (I used 2 tsp Orgran Egg Free with 4 Tbsp Water)
3 sheets frozen, ready rolled vegan Puff Pastry, partially thawed
1 Tbsp Sesame Seeds

Use the grater on your food processor to coarsely grate the onion, carrot and zucchini. Heat oil in a large non stick frying pan and add this mixture plus the corn and the garlic and cook over medium heat, stirring, until softened. About 5 minutes. If there is liquid in the pan strain it off but my mixture was pretty dry.

Put this in a large bowl and add remaining ingredients but only half the egg replacers, stirring until well mixed.

Cut each pastry sheet in half and spoon 1/6 of the mixture onto the long edge of the pastry. Roll to encase it, brush the edge with remaining egg replacer to seal and cut each vegetable log into 3. Place onto oiled baking trays. Brush tops with the leftover egg replacer, making more if you need to and sprinkle the tops with the sesame seeds.

Bake at 220C for 10-20 minutes or until rolls are puffed and golden. Be careful to leave room between them on the trays so the sides can brown up as well otherwise you end up with soggy pastry on the sides!

Enjoy with more sauce and either steamed veggies or a salad.

In other news (I appear to like saying that, I think I say it a lot) I am trying to cut down/out wheat on some advice for my stomach so you might be seeing a few different things around here in the future. I won't be gluten free, but I will be making some gluten free things.

I got enthusiastic at 8pm the other night and made some gluten free vegan brownies from a recipe I found on Recipe Zaar. They were okay, the middle was good, it probably didn't help that I only made half a batch in case I mucked them up so I cooked them in my mini cake tins, meant there were lots of crispy edges. They went soft once you heated them up again though and the kids LOVED them. I dished them up with some of Dreenas Cashew Banana Ice Cream for them. Sorry about the picture, 8:40pm does not make for good food porn :P
Last night I happened to discover a gluten free bakery/cafe/grocery store just in the suburb over from mine. I went for a visit today and the place is wonderful! I only got a couple of things but I plan to head back there for more! Lunch today was a gluten free roll:

I slathered it in peanut butter and strawberry jam and while it was the teeniest bit more heavy than wheat bread you would have never known the difference! In the past the gluten free breads I have tried have always been crumbly, way too dense and awful...but this was REALLY good! I'll definitely be buying more of them in the future.

The rest of my loot? Well, you'll just have to wait for that :P

ETA: Someone remind me NEVER to decide to change my blog template!!! For some reason I got it in my head that I would, but then it wouldn't let me, then I realized I hadn't backed up my template so I couldn't revert it back! I finally managed to get mine back up but I had to wipe all my blog links and stuff and now it won't let me import my blog subcriptions from my google reader, it's trying to tell me I don't have any. I'm going through by hand and adding them one by one but with 75+ subscriptions it's taking some time and I'm cranky and frustrated. So if you notice your blog missing from my links, I promise you, it's coming back! Eventually :P ARRRRRRRGHHHHH!

Burgers are always a good standby.

2008-06-18T15:52:00.003+10:00

I'm really tempted to say I haven't blogged for so long because I've been busy, but that's just not true :P I've been lazy. Lazy, lazy, lazy. Cooking different dinners for everyone every night gets very tiring and I guess I've also been in a slump, although I'm starting to feel like being in a cooking slump is the norm for me! I have baked, but they've all been family favourites and I've eaten lots of reheated UFO's (unidentified frozen objects) from my freezer and many many nights of things like rice and beans, repeats and dinners of just plain processsed cr%p!

Some of the highlights however were Vegan Dad's Chicken Wings in patty form, the kids just love these:
Sausage Bean Patties which were yummy but not as good as the ones we had last night:
I had an absolute disaster with these:
Purple Kohlrabi. Beautiful to look at, but not recommended to steam then shallow fry. They were so awful I LET us all throw them out!

In between all those I managed to kill my computer and needed to do a reinstall which meant that all my photos got moved over to the portable hard drive and I think this only suceeded in making me even lazier to take and upload photos!

Then I lost my camera cord, but I managed to dig it up today :)

Last night I decided to pull myself together a little and make something I saw blogged about the other day here. I had no old bay seasoning (I've never seen it in Australia) and wouldn't probably eat it because of the cayenne pepper so I googled away and came across this which I followed exactly minus the cayenne pepper. I made the burgers as the recipe states only omitting the cayenne pepper from them and using whole rye flour instead of whole wheat and using fresh cooked mushrooms instead of tinned. They were really yummy! The kids weren't so keen but I'll definitely be having these again:
Tonight I'm whipping up something new that will hopefully be yummy so stay tuned :P

Lemon and Dill Risotto and Muffins.

2008-06-04T10:20:00.004+10:00

I found this recipe in a rice cooker book from the library. As you might remember, I made the Asparagus Risotto from Veganomicon a little while back and deemed risotto not worth all the stirring. Then I found a rice cooker on sale for half price and at a mere $14 I couldn't say no!

First things first. Risotto in the rice cooker is dead easy and means that we'll be having a lot more risottos around here in the future! And it was every bit as creamy as the one I made stirring, stirring, stirring but...well...without the stirring!

The best bit of all is that it was all done in the rice cooker so the rice cooker was the only thing I needed to wash up (yay for one pot wonders!)

I was also really happy to find a Lemon and Dill combination. When I went veg, I had really liked Lemon and Dill on fish (although I wasn't a huge fan of the fish underneath, I loved the lemon and dill). I didn't really know what else I could incorporate my favourite seasonings into and this was perfect. Please excuse the flashy photo. It starts getting dark here about 4:45pm so by dinnertime there's no where to photograph (plus it was getting cold!). I know loads of people say that you shouldn't share food porn if it's got a flash but meh :P
Lemon and Dill Risotto
Serves 4 (but I think more like 4 side dishes)
From Rice Cooker by Brigid Treloar

2 Tbsp Olive Oil
1 clove Garlic, crushed
1 Leek, sliced across to make rings
1 1/2 cups Aborio Rice
1/2 cup Dry White Wine
2-3 cups Vegetable Stock (I used this amount for half though, so have extra handy!)
1/2 tsp Salt Freshly Ground Black Pepper
1/2 cup Parmesan Cheese, grated (I think this is optional really)
1-2 Tbsp Lemon Juice
1 tsp finely grated Lemon Zest
2 Tbsp chopped fresh Dill

Set up your rice cooker and hit the "cook" button. Heat the olive oil for 1 minute then add the leeks and garlic and cook stirring until softened. About 3-5 minutes.

Add rice and stir to coat it in the oil. Add the wine, stock, salt and pepper, replace the lid and be sure it is still in cook mode. Cook for 10 minutes, stir, then cook a further 10.

Stir rice again, fold in lemon juice and zest and cheese if using and replace lid. Let stand on the warm function for 10 minutes, then stir through dill (alternatively you can just sprinkle the dill on top but I love dill).

Yesterday, I got my benchtop oven replaced. Same brand as my last post, so fingers crossed this one doesn't explode on me! So far so good.

It has been raining here solidly for the last 2 days and is set to rain for at least another 3. I felt like baking but was torn between making an old favourite and making something new. When I went through the freezer I only had 1/2 a cup of pureed pumpkin, not a whole cup like I thought so that made my decision a lot easier!

6 VwaV Best Ever Pumpkin Muffins. Perfect as always and 6 Raisin Carrot Muffins with sultanas instead of raisins cause I didn't have any. These are awesome. Just sweet enough but not too sweet and low in fat too! (on a paper towel because I forgot to take a photo until there were about 4 left, this is the Carrot Raisin one, given the tick of yumminess by the Unvegettes)

I got a new toy to play with....

2008-06-01T13:48:00.002+10:00

My oven that won't heat above 200C (providing you turn it on for at least an hour and 15 minutes and don't open the door for anything or it drops immediately to 150C) was driving me crazy! I made some chicken wings from Vegan Dad the other night and ended up with wings that were black on the bottom and raw on the top (which seems to be the case with this oven). So after much ahhhming and ahhhing I bought myself one of these.

Many many thanks to the wonderful Celine who was kind enough to answer the barrage of questions I emailed her with about the pros and cons of a benchtop oven. I have to say, I love it! I can heat it up to 180C in 10 minutes, I can put the time on so I don't burn stuff and best of all I can see stuff being cooked! And the one I got also fits a 30cm pizza (woo hoo!).

Anyway, I had to of course break it in so last night decided on some sweet potato and bean enchiladas which I've blogged about before here. No photo because it was super dark and my flash turned them blindingly white! (Huh, turns out my photo skills were just as bad back then!)

The day after I needed to break it in properly (read I needed to bake junk food). I just didn't know what I wanted to cook. Anyway, I remembered that my Grandma had bought me a little cupcake and cookies cookbook for Christmas that is sadly not vegan, but I decided it was time to crack it open and found these Chocolate Lace Crisp Cookies. The only veganizing they needed was a single egg and being a complete dingbat at veganizing I just subbed with egg replacer. I don't know if that was why but mine spread horrendously so they don't look super pretty (unlike the photo in the book of the petite, perfectly circular cookies) but mmmmm they are good! Crispy on the outside yet chewy in the middle and full of chocolatey goodness.
I will share the recipe, but I want to try and figure out why the spread and how to stop it first. I suspect it was the sugar I used.

Anyway, other than playing with my new toy, I have actually cooked some other food. Mr Unveg bought back a bag of Lamyong Mushroom Chunks for me on his last trip away. Sadly they were defrosted by the time he got here so I had to cook them the next morning. I cooked up the two casseroles here and here that I've blogged before and had one for dinner that night and now have 7 more waiting for me in the freezer. I missed these so much!
I made some Lemony Garlic Pasta which I believe is from Eat, Drink and Be Vegan but I found the recipe blogged here. It sounded delicious and it was super simple and very quick. And it was good. So good in fact that the smallest in the house ate 3, yes, that's 3 big bowls full of it and demanded I keep the leftovers for her (not that there were many by that stage). The eldest liked it too but only ate one bowl and one complained and wouldn't eat it (but there's always one who does :P)
I decided to try again with Terry's Oatmeal Cookies from Veganomicon only this time I timesed (is that a word?) the spices by 1 1/2 and added choc chips to the mix. They were perfect! I think they'd actually be fine without the choc chips like I made before as long as you add more spice to them. These disappeared very quickly.
Last but not least I tried Vegan Dads breakfast sausages. They are yummy but I'm not sure on the maple glaze (personal taste, there was nothing at all wrong with it). I'm not much of a sweet sausage person but I enjoyed them a lot (and I love the sausage without the glaze!) With them I had VwaV baking powder biscuits, steamed carrot, broccoli and couscous (no I couldn't eat it all!).
Last nights dinner was the most exciting of all. I was preheating the grill in the new toaster oven to cook the kids dinner and and a flash of white light burst out of the thing and it made a sharp electrical sound. Then it worked no more :( So back it went today, but they didn't have any more so I am ovenless again until they get more in.

I did cook, though I had to change plans suddenly. I decided on the Tomato and Caper Couscous from Veganomicon which I've had before, but I used my millet couscous (which is really just like fine millet), cooked it a bit longer in the tomato juice and it lent a beautiful creaminess to this dish that I loved. I also threw in some sliced olives because I love those too and decided last time I would. It was perfect!

Oh Chocolate, how I love thee!

2008-05-26T10:39:00.004+10:00

Look at this little guy. Isn't he cute? He lives somewhere in the neighbourhood and seems to think our place is his (much to the frustration of Charlotte and Toby). I looked up yesterday afternoon to see him sitting on the roof of the entertainment area looking down on me (which explained why Toby was running around the back yard like his tail was on fire).

I found this blog the other week and really wanted to try some of the recipes. They're low fat, healthy and yummy looking! Anyway, I decided to start my journey with some of the low fat cookies (of course!) and chose these Brownie Cookies. I baked mine for about half the time he states on his blog because I like my cookies chewy and soft rather than crunchy. They were great! Best eaten on the day they are made, by day 2 they were a lot softer and by day 3 they were like cake (Mr Unveg is away and one of the Unvegettes has been sick, hence them lasting so long).
I think what I liked best of all, aside from the low fat factor, was that there was a whole 1/4 cup of flax meal in them so I could give them to the kiddies and at least tell myself that they were healthier!

The other night after dinner I had a mad craving for peanut butter and chocolate. I rummaged through the pantry, did a bit of googling and decided on buckeyes (I won't bother with a recipe, there are a gazillion on the internets).

Only thing was, I was in a hurry to munch them so I skipped over the freezing of the peanut butter balls part and of course as soon as I stuck them in the melted chocolate they started to collapse! I gave up on the buck eye part and just made plain ol' peanut butter balls. They were delightfully delicious and helped to make the cheap and nasty (but vegan) choc chips I bought taste semi chocolatey. They were a pain in the butt to make but I'll definitely make them again!
Today I hit lunch time and wanted...you guessed it! Chocolate. So out came the hazelnuts, the food processor and my trusty Veganomicon. I give you...Not-tella. Delicious! I've had to restrain myself all afternoon from standing at the fridge, spoon in hand and putting it directly into my mouth! The only issue I had was user related and involves having stuck a tablespoon of oil too much into the mix so it's a little runny...but I know for next time!
To counteract all that sugary chocolatey-ness I had some sauteed seitan and spinach (with the addition of a fresh tomato) from Veganomicon. Mmmmmmm good!

Foods!

2008-05-22T15:15:00.003+10:00

It's funny, I keep thinking I have absolutely nothing to blog. Then I decide I have something, upload all the photos and realize there was way more than I thought I had cooked!

First up this week I decided I wanted muffins. But we seem to have hit a patch where I'd run out of a lot of my pantry staples and every recipe I decided on I was missing something (and it was generally one of the main ingredients or something I couldn't really sub). Anyway, I stumbled upon my Vegan Vittles and because I've never made anything out of it before, decided it really was time to crack it open.

What I came across was some "Muffins that taste like donuts" (yes, that is what they are called) so I decided we could all use some vegan donut-ness in the house. The only thing I did different was put them in mini muffin holes instead of regular ones.

They came out a teensy bit dry....problem solved real quick!

My belly has been acting up so I've been looking for some recipes that are pretty much everything free but veggies and grains. I remembered I'd been eyeing off the Butternut Vindaloo from Vegan with a Vengeance and because it was cold decided to give that a go. The only thing I did differently was to cook it in the slow cooker instead of on the stove/in the oven. It was yummy!

I served it with rice and some of the flat breads I made the other day, only this time I threw the Kalonji seeds into the dough instead of rolling them in at the last minute.
The night after I decided to finally try General Tao's Seitan. I got the recipe from the PPK forums but I'm 99% sure that it was originally the one from vegweb minus the green onions (which I'll put in next time) and without the sherry option and this one had like 1/4 cup white wine vinegar which I didn't like at all, next time I'll try it with the 1 Tbsp! It was okay, but not wonderful, not helped by the fact that it was cold so I had to reheat it and then it got chewy instead of crispy :P It sort of reminded me of sweet and sour pork without the pork.
Last but not least, I made some home made pizza. I decided to make the dough using the recipe from the book that came with the bread machine. I ummed and ahhed and threw in a Tbsp of milk powder. Serves me right, stick with vegan pizza dough! I ended up with a bread bin full of sticky goo that couldn't be saved so I started again using Isa's recipe from Vegan with a Vengeance (see link above) and it came out perfectly.

Nothing special on this one, tomato pasta sauce, pizza cheese (yes, I still haven't got past cheese on my pizza), green capsicum, onion, mushrooms, kalamata olives, pineapple and I threw on some capers at the last minute because I used to love anchovies on my pizza (they're about the only meaty thing I really miss other than bacon, in theory anyway, I don't think I could actually eat either now). It turned out great, the salty baby capers were perfect!

Potato and Celeriac Gratin, More Milky Stuff and Bombay Potatoes Masala.

2008-05-16T17:23:00.004+10:00

More with the lazy persons blogging :P

This week I've been busy. I found celeriac at the supermarket the other day and snatched it up. I had seen some last season but when I decided what to do with it it wasn't there anymore and they never got anymore (seems to be the thing to do around here!). So I did some googling, because of course after 6 months of not being able to find it again, I threw out the recipe).

It seems that celeriac is mostly used cold and somewhat raw (although generally blanched) in salads. I didn't particularly fancy salad, partly because I'm not a big salad fan and partly because with autumn kicking in in the evening I didn't feel like something cold.

Anyway, I came across this and decided it was the way to go. I used my mandoline to cut the potatoes and celeriac really thin and the rest I followed the recipe (subbing marg for butter, I would like to try this with cashew cream next time too). I thought it was really yummy. The celeriac became soft and was really melty and mild tasting. Mr Unveg however stated he would rather it just be potato next time. Me? I liked the different texture and slightly different taste of the celeriac and would have it again in a heartbeat.
This gratin was nice too in that it didn't contain massive amounts of fat. A lot of these types of dishes require you to pour half a tub of margarine or butter over each individual layer of vegetable and half a tub of cream.

Yesterday I read on the PPK forums about Peanut Milk (not that I believe the hype, it just sounded yummy). I had seen the website before but not really thought about it again, but then I got thinking after seeing the post on the forum that chocolate peanut milk could very well feed my peanut butter and chocolate addiction! So I just had to give it a try. I couldn't find any raw peanuts so I bought unsalted, roasted ones. I used 3/4 of a cup and threw in 2 Tbsp of Almond Meal with 3 1/2 cups of water and blended away, then strained through cheesecloth. Just like almond milk really but without the soaking. Once I had strained it I set aside 1 cup to try plain (because I like my almond milk plain and my cashew milk as well and it's always good to try some plain) and mixed the other 2 and a 1/2 cups with a heaped teaspoon of Rice Syrup and half a teaspoon of Vanilla Extract. I haven't tried it yet, I'll share the verdict tomorrow, hopefully along with a lower fat choc chip cookie recipe (just have to try them once they cool down! We ate them all hot, nom, nom, nom).
Dinner tonight was more Indian food. I am really loving Indian Food these days! I seem to crave it! Anyway, I wanted something that would be yummy but still gentle on the tummy and something potato based and I came across Bombay Potatoes Masala. I got the recipe off the internets but I can't seem to find it right now! Ugh.

Bombay Potatoes Masala

450-500g New Potatoes
20g Margarine
1 large Onion, sliced
3 cloves Garlic, crushed
1 tsp Yellow Mustard Seeds
2 tsp Garam Masala
1 tsp Ground Coriander
1 tsp Ground Cumin
½ tsp Chilli Powder
¼ tsp Ground Turmeric
400g can chopped/crushed Tomatoes

Boil the potatoes (or microwave them) until just tender.

Heat the butter in a deep pan and cook the onion and garlic until the onion is translucent and soft.

Stir in the mustard seeds, garam masala, coriander, cumin, chilli powder, and turmeric.

Once the spices have blended nicely add the tomatoes and cook for a couple of minutes until the sauce begins to thicken.

Add the potatoes and continue cooking until they are heated through and coated with the sauce.

Serve with Naan and some plain rice.

From Happiness to Gripe-iness

2008-05-10T20:56:00.004+10:00

I went to Woolworths the other day and as I was walking past the fresh soy milks I happened to glance over and see this:

I was super excited that Australia finally appears to have fresh rice milk (I think it's fresh anyway, waiting on confirmation from Vitasoy). For those of us who live in Australia and are soy intolerant this is awesome! It's a little on the expensive side so more for drinking than for cooking with and it tastes wonderful.
Then today I picked up a packet of Cadbury Dark Chocolate Chips, which have been vegan for as long as I have been vegetarian (and I dare say for a long time before). Another reminder to always, always check the label! I got them home, opened them and, despite still eating some dairy, I could taste it as soon as I threw some in my mouth. So I turned the packet over and...yep, milk solids. ARRGGGHHH! WHY?!?! (yes, I realize this sounds hypocritical but I do my best to not consume too many dairy products, especially in things like chocolate where it really isn't a necessary ingredient).

Anyway, rant over (well for now :P). Onto some food.

This week I have been experimentational (is that even a word? Oh well, it is now!) but not exactly successful (meh, these things happen, I'm trying to not let it dampen my enthusiasm for trying new things).

The other night I wanted quick and easy and felt like some sauteed seitan (plus I had to clean out the fridge. So this was a mixture of chicken seitan sauteed with baby corn, carrot and spinach and topped with bbq sauce. It was good, but not wonderful:
I made Mozzarella Couscous. I can't remember where I got this recipe from (I didn't write it down at the time for some reason) but it was basically couscous with basil and topped with a saute of eggplant, fresh tomato, onion, basil and mozzarella cheese. It was just okay:
Yesterday I made cookies. The first oatmeal cookies I ate I wasn't fond of, but oddly I seem to have been craving them lately! So I decided on Terry's Chewy Oatmeal Raisin Cookies, except half way through Mr Unveg said "I don't like raisins, just make them plain, with cinnamon". I knew better of course and would have throw in choc chips except I was out (which is why I was buying milk laden ones today...). They were still good, a little bland, the kids have been polishing them off, but next time I'm definitely adding the raisins!
This morning I decided I felt like some flat bread so I whipped up these. I added Kalonji seeds in the last rolling because I adore Kalonji seeds! (also called Nigella Seeds):
All you need is:

2 cups of Atta Flour
1/2 tsp Salt
3 1/2g dry Yeast (I used 1 tsp)
Kalonji Seeds

Place flour, yeast and salt in a large bowl. Make a well in the middle and pour in about 200-250ml warm water. Mix to form a soft dough.

Turn out dough onto a floured surface and knead for about 5 minutes or until smooth.

Put dough back into the bowl (I greased mine first with some canola spray) and set aside, covered with a damp tea towel, in a warm place until doubled in size.

Punch dough down and split into 8. Form each piece into a circle, flatten with the palm of your hand and roll out into a 13cm circle. At the last minute, sprinkle on some Kalonji Seeds and gently roll across the top (they'll sort of sink in).

Heat a small frying pan over medium heat and cook for about 1 minute on the seeded side or until it starts to brown, flip over and cook for about another 30 seconds. Serve warm.

Makes 8.

These were super yummy while they were hot. So melty they didn't need anything on them at all!

And last but not least, I found some Broccoli Rabe in the supermarket the other day and was super excited because it's been about 6 months since I last saw it here. It seems to be one of those products that they stock every now and then when they get some in by accident or something.

Anyway, I came home, did some googling and had it as a side dish tonight. I simply boiled it (375g) for 2 minutes then put it in cold water and drained. Rolled it up, sliced it and then sautee'd it, over medium heat in about a tablespoon of olive oil with a clove of garlic and sprinkled it with about half a teaspoon of paprika flakes (chilli it was meant to be but we all know I can't stomach chilli :P) and then at the last minute stirred in some parmesan cheese. It was amazing! I hope I can find some more in the shops and soon!

Cookies...cookies....and muffins?

2008-05-05T14:12:00.001+10:00

I've been lazy again with my blogging! To be honest, I'm going through another patch where I'm not feeling very inspired and what has inspired me has been a big bunch of repeats.

I have done some experimenting and some cooking but none of it has been quite right.

I made some chocolate gelato with rice and oat milk and loads of cocoa. It's super rich and it's quite yummy but I think it needs to be a teeny bit creamier (even though gelato isn't ice cream). I might try it with coconut milk or cream next time. (No pic of it, it just looked like brown ice in a tub, I'm sure you can imagine :P)

I made Hint Of Cinnamon Choc Chippers from The Every Day Vegan by Dreena Burton. They spread like crazy and my stupid oven decided to burn the bottoms a little on some of them. I thought they'd be icky but they disappeared within 4 hours (a lot of them disappeared right inside me!) My only gripe is that the dough was more like batter and a little hard to work with. But I loved that they didn't have much fat in them (and what they did came primarily from the choc chips). The hint of cinnamon was just right! (They look more burnt than they actually were~excuse the flash, it's wintertime and my main light blew)
I made a humungous batch of Ratatouille in the slow cooker. I've made it before using Mums recipe and loved it. I couldn't find it though so I used one I pulled out of a magazine. It was okay but not super great :(
I decided to be creative and came up with Strawberry Cardamom Muffins with Cardamom Cashew Cream. I ate one and it was yummy (very rich with the cashew cream but still yummy) but we'd eaten a batch of muffins the day before and no one seemed that interested after all the chocolatey goodness of VwaV Mocha Choc Chip Muffins! Most of them ended up feeding the seagulls at the local tip (well I like to imagine they at least fed somebody)
Today I had major success with Peanut Butter Cookies from The Joy of Vegan Baking. If you haven't made these before you must make them. My only complaint is that once cooked, the peanut butter flavour is very subtle (but maybe that's because I am more than happy eating peanut butter out of the jar with a spoon!) I who hates peanut butter with a passion said she could taste it but she ate one so maybe it is subtle. We made half plain and half with choc chips. The choc chips come highly recommended :P Oh and just try keeping your finger out of that batter! I'm really surprised we got any into the oven at all. Myself and 2 of the unvegettes were super busy licking every last drop of dough from the bowls, beaters and spoons!

200th Post....

2008-04-23T19:55:00.002+10:00

Wow, where does the time go to? And what am I going to blog about for my 200th post? First I thought what is a super yummy super good food that I can blog about but then I thought well maybe I won't do food. Maybe I will pick something else even more significant in my life than food (and my allergies to it all :P).

I have ummed and ahhed about posting this all month because I am predominantly a food blogger, however, as any of you who follow my blog know, I have IBS (Irritable Bowel Syndrome~please, someone introduce me to the person who came up with that title so I can kick them up the a$@e!!!)

I know that generally people think IBS is in a persons head and that they should just get over it. Well, yes, it sort of is and it sort of isn't. The problem with IBS is that while it feeds off our emotions and stress and the like it is still a physical problem. And the worst of it is, that it is a terribly embarrassing problem (says she who starts chatting about IBS on a food blog :P) The best way I can describe life with IBS is to say think back to the last time you had the most fantastical gastric tummy bug you can remember. That feeling of not quite knowing if you're going to "make it" in time. The gut wrenching, cold sweat inducing stomach cramps...well that's life with IBS, except it's not something that we get and is gone after a few days of feeling rubbish. It can strike anytime, anywhere and with NO warning what so ever. For me, feeling good is non existent. I do not know what it is like to say I feel fine, for me, having stomach cramps after lunch, feeling achy and exhausted and not spending an entire day in the toilet is a good day. A bad one? You don't really want to know!

With the physical symptoms come a range of emotional and mental ones and a lot of us (not all) who suffer with IBS also suffer from anxiety and depression. I go through periods with the depression but the anxiety, well, it is always with me and while there is help for anxiety, it has a whole new level to deal with when it is attached to ill health, because the fear of suddenly feeling violently ill in public and not being able to find a toilet isn't just a fear that has blown out of proportion, it is a very real fear.

Sadly the treatments available don't work for most of us, have more side effects than it is worth putting up with and the thought of spending the rest of your life feeling this way and that no one can help you (yes, I have actually had doctors tell me that they don't have anything else left to try on me) is extremely devastating.

I won't bore you all anymore with too many details and if you've made it this far, thank you. The reason I wanted to say all this, other than the fact that it is my 200th post is because April is IBS awareness month. If you would like some more information because you know someone that has IBS, have it yourself or just because you can read more here.

Thanks for reading and I'll be back soon with more yummy food (and no more talk of bowels, I promise!)

Parathas and Braised Seitan with Red Wine and Mushroom Gravy

2008-04-21T15:57:00.004+10:00

Two things to blog about tonight :)

The first is some Indian flat bread I made the other night...Parathas.

These were SOOO yummy (but kind of high in fat so not one for the everyday meal :P) and the kids adored them. They said they tasted like pancakes, although I can't say I agree but they were delicious all the same! I need to work on my dough rolling skills a little however! Oh and they're not traditional because of the margarine, generally ghee is used.
Parathas

2 1/2 cups Atta Flour (you can get this from most Indian stores and some supermarkets), sifted
1 1/2 tsp Salt (or less if using salted margarine)
5 Tbsp melted Margarine
2/3 cup Warm Water
Extra flour for rolling
Extra melted margarine (about half a cup)

Mix the flour and salt in a bowl and drizzle in the margarine. Rub until mixture resembles breadcrumbs and then add most of the warm water and form into a dough, adding more water if necessary. Knead for about 10 minutes or until dough is smooth. Let rest for at least half an hour and up to 3 hours, covered.

Knead dough again quickly and cut into 10 pieces (try to make them equal). From a piece of the dough into a round disc and on a floured surface roll out into a 19cm (or as close to) circle. Using a brush, brush melted margarine onto the top surface of the dough circle then make a cut from the centre of the circle to the outside edge. Roll the dough into a cone shape. Place cone large end down onto surface and squash flat with hand. Repeat with remaining dough.

Reflour surface and use a rolling pin to gently re roll the dough circles into 16cm circles. Heat a non stick frying pan over medium heat and add a small amount of margarine. Fry gently for about 2 minutes or until starting to brown, then flip over and do remaining side. Add more margarine if needed. Keep hot while cooking remaining Parathas (this makes a lot so if you're not feeding many halve the recipe, that works well too).

The other day Mr Unveg and I decided it was time for a slow cooker. This way I can either chuck my stuff in the pot at lunch time and have it ready for dinner and cook his and the Unvegettes at dinner time or I can have theirs ready at dinner while I cook mine. He got to use it yesterday, so today was my turn (yay!)

I did some research (read googling) and came across Fresh from the Vegetarian Slow Cooker on Amazon. I did a random hit and Braised Seitan with Red Wine and Mushroom Gravy popped up and sounded delicious so I decided to give it a try (and I have to say, I REALLY want this book, but for now will make do with a few randoms from amazon browsing ::blush::).

I changed a couple of things with the recipe so I'll post my version (because the one from the book wasn't really working for me so I had to sub some stuff, but it's not very different). Please excuse the kitty hair or whatever it is in front, I later extracted it from my mouth (blech!) but be grateful you got a photo because I was half finished when I realized so I raced off from the table with my plate screaming "photo" at Mr Unveg and arranged what was left creatively so you couldn't tell :P
Braised Seitan with Red Wine and Mushrooms
(adapted lightly from Fresh from the Vegetarian Slow Cooker)

2 Tbsp Olive Oil
460g Seitan, cut into ½ inch thick slices (I used this one)
1 large Brown Onion, chopped
2 cloves Garlic, minced
240g small white Mushrooms, large diced
1 cup Vegetable Stock
2 Tbsp Tomato Paste
3/4 cup Dry Red Wine
1 tsp Dried Thyme Leaves
Salt and Ground Black Pepper
1/2 tsp Gravy Browner

Heat half the oil in a frying pan over medium heat and brown the seitan until brown . Remove and set aside.

Reheat frying pan with remaining oil and add onion and saute about 5 minutes or until softened and lightly browned. Stir in garlic and cook for about 30 seconds.

Throw mushrooms and seitan into pan and give a good stir then add all to a non stick oil sprayed slow cooker. Combine the stock, tomato paste, wine and dried thyme and pour over the seitan mixture. Season with salt and pepper. Cover and cook on low for 6-8 hours stirring occasionally.

Once you've nearly finished cooking, scoop out about 1 cup of the mushrooms with stock and pour into blender, blend with the gravy browner and stir back in to thicken the sauce.

With it we had rice and veggies because while we were buying the stock pot we happened to find some rice cookers they were selling out at a mere $14 as ex display stock (what do I care if someone touched it? I washed it after all :P)

Lentil Hommus and Asparagus and Lemongrass Risotto

2008-04-16T15:57:00.002+10:00

First up I need to apologize! Glidingcalm, you left 2 comments on my blog as did Carrie and I accidentally hit the reject button instead of publish. I have tried desperately to back peddle and print them but blogger just won't let me :( So Glidingcalm, if you leave another one I'd love it! (I always love to check out the blogs of people who comment on here) and thank you!

Carrie, I bought some heavy aluminium pie tins from the local cooking store, they were relatively cheap and can be reused unlike foil ones. I just put the raw pie dough into these and then filled and topped them before baking in the oven. Hope this helps!

Okay onto blogging: I have never cooked Risotto before. No wait, I lied, I did, once, many, many, many years ago. Way back before I could even boil pasta. And it was bad. The rice didn't cook and I didn't know any better so I served up a bowl of what felt like flavoured pebbles. Mmmm delish :P.

So anyway, last night I decided to tackle my fear of Risotto and in case you haven't noticed from what I cook, standing at my stove and stirring, stirring, stirring for hours on end is not my idea of a good time. I do not find it soothing, relaxing nor do I see meditational properties in it. I loathe it.

So anyway, last nights dinner was yummy. I will give it that much. But I don't personally think it was 30 minutes of constant stirring yummy (no offence to the authors, I've no doubt it's just personal taste). Neither did Mr Unveg.
But fear not! I am not removing risotto from my R'epertoire entirely! I plan to have risotto in the future. I plan to have cheats risotto, with my secret weapon up my sleeve :P
Today I decided I wanted hommus (don't you just love random cravings?). I'm coming down with the flu and as any of you who read my blog on a regular basis know, chickpeas don't like me much. I had seen hommus made with lentils in the past so using a number of recipes decided to see what I could come up with. This one I like. It's flavourfull but fairly mild and must be good because K licked it from the food processor bowl with the spatula once I'd put it in a bowl! Being sick and lazy I used tinned lentils and I didn't make a lot because I didn't want to chuck it out if it was gross so you can easily double this (I can't wait to try it with whole red lentils!)
(Green) Lentil Hommus:

1 tin green Lentils (cooked ones or you can use 1 1/4 cups cooked lentils of your choice)
1 clove Garlic, minced
1 1/2 Tbsp Tahini
1 Tbsp Olive Oil
1/4 tsp Salt
1 tsp Cumin
1/4 tsp Ground Coriander
1/4 tsp Paprika
2 Tbsp Lemon Juice

Simply combine them all in your food processor and whizz like crazy until smooth and yummy, scrape down sides occasionally. Chill in fridge.

Next time I'm considering throwing 1/4 cup of cashews in there too, just to give it a creamier consistency with a bit more body, but it's awesome as it is (well we think so :P You may not!)

Warning: Do not breathe on anyone after consuming this or they may expire from your garlic breath!

Pies!

2008-04-13T14:01:00.002+10:00

This week Mr Unveg has been away for work and the unvegettes have been visiting with their Grandparents so I have had the house to myself for 3 days. I got lazy and did zero cooking, instead relying on UFO's (unidentified frozen objects) from the freezer but I decided today that I would stop being lazy and get working on those pies I promised from ages ago.

Anyway, I hunted around and figured seeing as I liked the ones I bought so much, I'd stick with those general flavours. I made 4 all up, 2 were Spinach and Ricotta and 2 were Curried Lentil and they were pretty good. (As you can see, I need to work a little on my pie making skills, also excuse the lighting, it's dark and stormy and with daylight savings over it's dark by 5:15pm).

Next time I'll double the base pastry recipe because mine were a little thin and I might even pre bake them slightly, although they were starting to crisp up after 45 minutes. I cheated and used pre made puff pastry for the lids :P You can google the pie crust recipe, there's a million of them. Mine was basically flour, water, margarine and salt.

The fillings were:
Spinach and Ricotta
For 2 single serve pies:

200g fresh low fat Ricotta Cheese
Roughly 200g frozen Spinach, defrosted and sqeezed dry
1 Egg made with Orgran Egg Replacer Powder
1/4 tsp Salt
1/8 tsp White Pepper
1/8 tsp Ground Nutmeg
1 clove Garlic, crushed

Mix all together in a bowl and fill pie case.

These were yummy as is but next time I might add 1/4 of a diced Onion and a bit of cheddar or something.

Curried Lentil Filling:
For 2 single serve pies (can be doubled or even tripled)

1/2 cup whole Lentils (I used whole red but green or brown would work too)
1 1/2-2 cups Hot Water
1/4 cup crushed Tomatoes
1 tsp Oil 1/4 Onion, finely chopped
1/2 tsp crushed Ginger
1/2 tsp crushed Garlic
1/4-1/2 tsp Turmeric
1/2 tsp Ground Coriander
1/4 tsp whole Cumin Seeds
1/2 tsp Garam Masala
Salt to taste

If you wish soak lentils for an hour or 2 before cooking.

Heat oil in a heavy based medium saucepan (or use a large one if making more). Cook onion until softened and starting to brown and add onion and garlic. Cook about 1 minute more and add turmeric, coriander, cumin seeds and garam masala. Cook another minute or 2 and add crushed tomatoes, lentils and hot water. Bring to a boil and cook for 30-40 minutes or until lentils are soft and almost all the liquid has evaporated. If your lentils are still hard add more water as needed.

Scoop into pie shells.

I hope to experiment more with pies in the future. But for now, I have some in the freezer and am all pie'd out :P

Gnocchi with Creamy Pumpkin Sauce

2008-04-08T13:41:00.004+10:00

When I saw this over at Happy Herbivore the other day I knew I'd be trying it and soon. Being me I made a few small changes (read I de-healthified it ::blush::)

Basically I used half of a Butternut Pumpkin (which was more like 3-4 cups worth diced rather than 3/4 cup but I'm feeding a lot of people and there were leftovers).

I made a cashew cream (1 cup cashews with 1 cup water whizzed in the blender until smooth).

I steamed my pumpkin (lazy) in the microwave steamer for 10 minutes and blended it with almost a cup of the cashew cream, pinch of salt, dash of white pepper, 1/4 tsp Garlic Powder and 1/4 tsp Ground Sage instead of the Oregano (I have a thing for sage and pumpkin). I then threw it in a saucepan and heated away (oh and I left out the cornstarch because the sauce was thick already).

Mmmmmm creamy goodness!

Heart Attack food and Red Lentil Dahl.

2008-04-06T18:52:00.002+10:00

Last night I decided on heart attack food. Now I've shown you guys a few fried chicken seitan recipes but I knew, as soon as I read this blog post by Carrie, that I just had to try this one. I'd seen the recipe before but seeing her picture of it made me drool. So last night, I used some of the chicken style seitan from Don't Eat off the Sidewalk II zine and battered it up. OMG, this was orgasmically good! I had leftovers despite more than halving the recipe so I threw it in the fridge expecting to chuck it out in a few days (I mean, who likes cold fried chicken right?) But NO! I grabbed a piece today just out of curiosity and it had gotten better. MUCH better! I couldn't believe it, it was better cold!!!! Anyway, if you have never made this particular recipe before (original here) go and make it.......just eat healthy for the rest of the week :P

Tonight I felt like some Dahl (after all that oil last night, no it wasn't really oily, but I can imagine the fat content of it). I did a hunt around and came across a number of recipes but none were quite what I was after. So I did some fiddling (because I find a lot of lentil recipes are very mildly spiced and while I don't like chilli hot, I like me some flavour!) and came up with this one. I hope you like it as much as I did! It officially hit my list of favourites. I served it up with some (store bought) steamed basmati with coriander and lime and (store bought, hey a girls allowed to be lazy you know!) Naan. Delicious!
Red Lentil Dahl:
Serves 2 with Rice and Naan or 1 if you eat it on it's own (or are a big eater, it should double fine)

1/2 cup Red Lentils, picked through and rinsed
1 1/2 cups hot Vegetable Stock/Broth
1/2 tsp Ginger, minced (or more if you like! I suspect I used 1 whole teaspoon!)
1/2 tsp Garlic, minced (as above, I'll clarify next time I make it, maybe start small :P)
1/2 tsp Turmeric
1/4 tsp Yellow Mustard Seeds
1/4 tsp Whole Cumin Seeds
1/4 tsp Whole Coriander Seeds, crushed lightly with a mortar and pestle
1/2 an Onion, chopped
1 Tbsp Olive Oil, divided
Salt to taste
Handful of baby spinach (or you could use frozen, but you'd need to reduce the stock)

Heat half the oil in a saucepan and fry the ginger and garlic for about 1 minute. Add 1 cup of the stock, the lentils, salt to taste and the turmeric. Bring to the boil then lower the heat and simmer gently for 15 minutes or until lentils are soft.

Meanwhile, heat the remaining oil in a small frying pan and fry the onion until lightly browned. Add the mustard, cumin and coriander seeds and covering lightly with a lid (they will splatter) cook until the mustard seeds pop. Scrape this mixture into the lentils, throw in the spinach and continue cooking them (it should only take 5 minutes, so you should still have about 10 minutes left for the lentils to absorb the flavours and finish cooking).

Keep an eye on them adding more stock if you need it (I threw the whole lot in at once so my lentils were super mushy by the time the stock absorbed which is fine by me, but if you don't like mush, use less stock and add more as you need it.)

Serve with rice and Naan.

White Bean Cutlets with Sage and Garlic....

2008-04-01T13:25:00.002+11:00

Okay, now that you've all woken up from passing out from shock that I am updating, let me explain briefly.

Any of you who follow know I have health problems. Anyway I had a sort of aha moment when I looked properly in to fructose malabsorption. So I have been busy trying to find a doctor around here (one of the places I called hasn't taken a new patient in 5 years!) and not having much luck. I guess I got a bit down with it all and to be honest, I've just been cooking stuff that I've blogged about before. To top it off, if I do happen to have this problem with fructose it will also rule wheat out of my diet which will mean no seitan and I've been wondering how on earth I am going to cope with being an egg free, wheat free (read seitan and bread free), fruit free, some veggie free, onion free, soy free, alcohol free, minimal lentil, minimal bean, minimal dairy vegetarian. (Whew, I feel confused just reading that massive list!) Oh well, I guess I'll figure something out!

Second up I just want to wish Mr Un-Veg a hugely Happy Birthday for yesterday (we didn't get to see him because he was away for work but he got back late last night). So....hope today is a good one (we're celebrating a day late) and we all love you (awwww, sappy right? :P)

Right, on to dinner (which is why you all come here). I decided to get a little creative with Isa's chickpea cutlets. What emerged from the oven was really yummy! Given that the original cutlet recipe is up on the net, I'm sure Isa won't mind if I post this variation (and if she does and she finds this she has my permission to kick my butt :P).

I served it up with crispy fried potatoes (basically cut up Kipfler potatoes that I steamed and then fried until brown and crunchy on the stovetop), gravy from Don't Eat Off the Sidewalk II, steamed English Spinach and baby corns. Mmmmmmm.
Okay recipe:

White Bean, Sage and Garlic Cutlets

1 400g tin Cannelini Beans
1/2 cup Gluten Flour (Vital Wheat Gluten)
1/2 cup Breadcrumbs
1 Tbsp Olive Oil
1/4 cup Vegetable Stock
2 Tbsp Tamari (or Soy Sauce)
1/4 tsp Salt
1 1/2-2 cloves Garlic
1/2 tsp Lemon Zest
1/2 tsp dried Sage (up this to 3/4 tsp if you like)
10-12 fresh Sage Leaves, chopped finely

Mash the beans in a small-medium sized bowl and add remaining ingredients. Knead for about 3 minutes until it all comes together. Divide mixture into 4 pieces and shape as desired. Bake at 180C for 20 minutes, turn and bake a further 10 minutes.

Last night I happened to glance at the bench and realized there were 2 almost black bananas. What else is there to do with black bananas but bake with them? So I made Veganomicons Lower Fat Banana Bread. I probably could have used an extra nana but it's majorly delicious anyway. I made mine into 2 1/2 small loaves, for some reason it rose like crazy so they're all really tall. As long as they taste good, I'm not caring how they look :P
Lastly I just want to say to you whose blogs I visit, I'm sorry for the lack of comments. I'm still there lurking and loving everything you are making as always!

Snails pace......

2008-03-20T19:41:00.004+11:00

I seem to be stuck in the land of too lazy to post. I'm still busy reading all your blogs and taking photos but I need a swift kick up the you know where to get me going again I think!

Anyway, I've made a number of new and not so new things this week.

First up some Indian inspired lentil patties. These were easy and off the cuff (much like my oh my god I forgot my lentil burger lentil burgers). 1 tin of drained brown lentils, 1 tsp Cumin, 1/2 tsp Ground Coriander, 1/4 tsp Turmeric, 1/4 cup dry breadcrumbs and enough natural yoghurt to hold it all together. I also coated them in crumbs before frying. Serve them up with a dollop of natural yoghurt on top if you wish (I did but I thought it was a little tart for my tastebuds, but it could have been the brand of yoghurt too):
I also wanted to make some Indian Flat Bread and when I saw these I knew I had to try them. I served them up with Palak Paneer (a different recipe this time to the last one and VERY green as you can see). These flat breads were delicious and so easy. Next time I'll make them just a fraction thicker than I did this time, but even the kids loved them.
Indian Spinach Bread~Palak Roti
Makes 6

Oil
1 tsp Cumin Seeds
50-60g chopped cooked Spinach (dry weight, once all water has been squeezed out)
250g Plain Flour
Salt
Melted Butter, Ghee or Margarine

Heat some oil in a frying pan, add the cumin seeds and fry until they crackle.

Mix the cumin seeds, spinach, flour and salt to taste and add enough water to make a tight dough (I used roughly 1/4 cup)

Divide dough into 6 pieces and roll each one into a ball then shape them into discs (I used a rolling pin).

Heat a frying pan (dry) and cook them on both sides until they brown up.

Remove from the pan and coat one side with a thin layer of melted margarine (I didn't do this step, I forgot and they were still good).

Taken from Floyds India by Keith Floyd.

Today because I hadn't baked in ages I decided to make the Gigantoid Peanut Butter Oatmeal Cookies from VwaV. I made a half batch. I don't know where I went wrong but my batter was way runny, almost like muffin batter so I had to add more oats and flour which means the flavour isn't as strong as I think it should be. I topped them with a plop (it was meant to be a drizzle, turns out I'm rubbish at drizzling) of chocolate and they're yummy. I also cut the sugar down to 1/3 cup of each type because I like garbagey peanut butter that's salted and sugared.
Last but not least dinner tonight. I knew as soon as I saw Lolo's recipe that I'd have to try this one. And by gosh, it's incredible! (not that I thought it wouldn't be). To make it a quick and easy meal I cheated and bought my Gnocchi and it was all done in like 15 minutes. Even Mr Unveg said it was delicious and that he'd happily eat it again (and we all know how hard the Unveg Tick of Approval is to earn). Go now to her website and try it! I used raw cashews in the Lemon Cashew Cream, I don't know how different it would be with roasted and salted but I thought these were perfect, light and yummy. Recipe:
Excuse the crummy lighting. We were having a thunder storm and it was darker than dark.

Spiced Potato Naan Bread.

2008-03-13T19:14:00.003+11:00

My posts have been getting fewer and further between lately. I apologize, I seem to be stuck in a bit of a life rut :P There's just been not much food enthusiasm going on at all.

I got adventurous a couple of times. I made a really nice Pumpkin Chilli which I really enjoyed, but chilli has been posted about SO many times I decided not to bother.

I made some Indian bread filled with a potato filling. It took me the better part of a day and then at dinner time I just didn't feel like them anymore because I'd snacked on one so I ended up eating a seitan chicken burger.

I attempted some Tamarind Rice, because I've really been enjoying tamarind lately, but the rice turned to mush and the recipe I had called for far too much tamarind. To top it off I burned the spice mix, not once, not twice, but 3 times and by the time I sat down to eat it I was completely over it.

After those I got disheartened and ate a lot of old favourites, which are yummy but you know, been there, blogged that :P

Anyway, this recipe I'd found in Super Food Ideas (an omni food mag I still buy on occasion for idea's for the Unveg). It was pretty easy, I could prepare some of it ahead and best of all, the rugrats who never eat anything veggie ALL ate it!

Spiced Potato Naan Bread
Makes 8 800g Sebago Potatoes (I just used white ones, they're not labelled at Coles)
1 Tbsp Vegetable Oil
1 large Brown Onion, chopped
2 tsp Ground Cumin
1 tsp Ground Coriander
1/2 tsp Turmeric
1/3 cup chopped fresh Coriander
Olive Oil cooking spray
2 x 200g packets mini plain Naan Bread (I used whole one's and cut them in half which worked fine)

Cut potatoes into about 1cm chunks. Boil on the stove for about 15 minutes or until tender. Drain and allow to cool (you can of course make them and then cover them and leave in the fridge for the next day or later that day).

Preheat oven to 200C. Cut a pocket in the mini Naan or cut larger one's in half and create a pocket in the middle with a sharp knife. (This is easier if you warm them a teeny bit in the microwave first, but it works without).

Heat oil in a large non stick frying pan over medium-high heat. Add onion and cook, stirring occasionally, for 5-7 minutes until softened. Add the spices and cook for about 30 seconds, until aromatic. Add the potatoes and cook, stirring occasionally until they are well browned, about 10 minutes (mine took 17 but they were fridge cold). Remove from heat, stir through fresh coriander and set aside to cool a little.

Spray a large baking tray with the olive oil spray and place about 4 Tbsp (1/4 cup) of the potato mixture into the pockets. Lay flat on the baking tray and spray the tops lightly with the oil spray.
Bake for 5-7 minutes or until lightly golden and crunchy. Serve warm.

These were great served with a dollop of natural yoghurt. Mmmmm.

Tamarind Roasted Root Vegetables and Ginger Choc Chip Muffins

2008-03-05T17:47:00.004+11:00

There has been SO many posts on roasted veggies lately and all of them were making me hungry! So I decided I wanted to get in on the action too. Now I know how to roast veggies, they're one of my favourite foods when the weather is cool (and thankfully it is getting that way). A while ago I came across this recipe for Tamarind Roasted Root Vegetables on the Veggie Meal Plans blog and just knew I had to try them! It was just a matter of waiting until it wasn't like a thousand degrees celsius and today was that day.

These were so nice! Sadly I have discovered my stupid oven, while looking gorgeous, stinks, and won't heat past 200C no matter how long you heat it up for so mine weren't crispy at all and took nearly an hour to cook instead of the 30 minutes :( But they were worth it anyway!
A couple of nights ago I made some other biscuits I found on Vegan Dad's blog. These were SO different to the one's I've been making from VwaV. I don't know if it's something I did but they were more like a cross between a scone and a muffin instead of a scone and a cookie and delicious. The kids and I polished off nearly a whole batch in one night ::blush::
The night after we had a lentil loaf from the magical loaf studio. This was AMAZING. I don't usually like loaves but this was like a veggie burger in loaf form (and the photo came out well if I do say so myself :P)
The other day we wanted muffins. I had the Joy of Vegan Baking out from the library so I decided to try making 2 different sorts at once (because 1 of my rugrats wanted ginger, one of them chocolate and one of them couldn't decide between the 2).
I've made the ginger muffins as per the book before and wasn't a fan of the lemon in them and I promised a recipe once I'd done some fiddling. These turned out really well, although I'm sure I could make them even better if I try again.

As well as the Ginger muffins I made a half batch of the Spiced Cocoa Muffins.

The cocoa one's came out kind of dry and we weren't crazy about them, although I didn't go with the chocolate chip option and if I do decide to try them again, I'll probably add them.

The ginger muffins, as I said, came out pretty well. If you'd like to try them (or do whatever you like) here's the recipe. For some reason, they were even better the next day!

Ginger Chocolate Chip Muffins

2 Flax Eggs (2 Tbsp Ground Flax plus 5-6 Tbsp Water whizzed in a blender until thick)
1/4 cup minced Ginger (you could use fresh, I cheated and got it out of a jar)
3/4 cup Sugar, halved into 1/4 plus 1/8 cup lots
2 cups Plain Flour
3/4 tsp Salt
1 tsp Baking Soda
1/2 cup Applesauce
1 1/3 cups Rice Milk (you could use another non dairy milk, but it helped the sweetness I think) 6-10 pieces Crystallized Ginger, chopped finely
1/4-1/2 cup Chocolate Chips (optional)

Put the ginger and half the sugar in a small saucepan and heat, stirring, over medium heat until it goes liquid. It'll only take a couple of minutes. Set aside to cool.

In a medium bowl combine the flour, salt and baking soda and set aside.

In a separate bowl combine the applesauce, flax eggs and remaining sugar and mix well. Add non dairy milk and stir.

Add the wet ingredients and the ginger sugar mixture to the dry and mix until just combined. Carefully stir in ginger pieces and choc chips if using.

Spoon the mixture into greased muffin tins and bake at 190C for 15-20 minutes or until it passes the toothpick test.

Makes 12.

Aloo Gobi, Smoke Crumbed Chicken and more.

2008-02-29T19:19:00.002+11:00

Who in the heck decided we needed to be able to label every single post. Honestly, sometimes I get so tempted to just leave it blank :P Anyway, rant over.

This week Mr Un-Veg is away which means, generally, easy meals.

First up was Esmes special sauce. I know I've blogged it before and it's nothing new, but I haven't eaten this since my last post and forgot just how yummy it really is! This time I added some fresh baby spinach that was just wilted and some cut up baby corn and it was heavenly, I definitely need to eat this more often! This time I threw in 2 Tbsp of everything except I added the mirin which I didn't do last time and only used 1 Tbsp. Mmm sooo gooood!
Then I made some black bean burgers from Ashasarala over at The Metal Femme's Vegan Living blog (which I've just discovered and am loving). Mine were a bit dry, I ended up throwing in 2 Tbsp of mayonnaise. I also used Rice Crumbs which I won't do again, for some reason they wouldn't stick (and they look uncooked in all the photo's for some reason, I think the dying sun was kind of shining through them or something but they looked much better in reality):
There was a PPK discussion very recently about loving smoked paprika, which I really do. I've temporarily forgotten who posted it but I'll amend this later when I get on there. They said they crumb their seitan in a mixture of breadcrumbs (they said Panko, but I was out and didn't feel like driving into the city so I used regular and it was fine) with some veggie salt (seasoned salt), savoury (nutritional) yeast flakes and some smoked paprika. So I tried it and it was awesome! I know you've all seen a thousand crumbed chicken seitan cutlets but meh, you get to see them again :P Seriously though, try this! (I used about a cup of crumbs, 1/4 tsp Salt, 2 Tbsp Nooch and 1/4 tsp Smoked Paprika).
Last but not least I also recently discovered the Happy Herbivore blog and am also adoring it! I decided, after seeing it on there, to make Aloo Gobi, only thing was hers used chilli and without it I knew the flavours wouldn't be what they should so I did some googling and came up with this one. It was good, but next time I'll probably double the spices, while I don't like heat, I do like my spices to be fairly prominent and they were really mild in this (again a crummy pic, it's starting to get dark earlier and earlier which I love for life but not so much for food porning):

Aloo Gobi
Serves 2-3 as a main, with rice or Naan bread

2 Potatoes, diced
1/2 Cauliflower, cut into florets
1/4 of an Onion, diced
1/2 tsp Ground Coriander
1/2 tsp Ground Cumin
1/4 tsp Turmeric
1/8 tsp Ground Cloves
1 Bay Leaf
1 tsp grated fresh Ginger
1 tsp (clove) minced Garlic
1 1/2 Tbsp Olive Oil
1/2 Tbsp Lemon Juice
1/3 cup Water

Boil the potatoes for about 12-15 minutes or until just tender (I did mine 12 and they were too soft). Remove, drain and set aside.

Soak the cauliflower in boiling (boiled) water while the potatoes are cooking.

Heat the oil in a large frying pan (really large! With a lid if you have one). Add the onion and cook a few minutes until starting to soften. Add the ginger and garlic and cook for another minute, then add the remaining dry spices and cook for about 30 seconds or until fragrant.

Add the potatoes, drained cauliflower and cook for another couple of minutes, mixing all well.

Add the water and lemon juice and cook for another 5-10 minutes or until veggies are cooked through.

Drizzle if you wish with a bit of soy or dairy yoghurt and serve with the bread or rice.

Lentil, Olive and Pumpkin Lasagna.

2008-02-25T15:42:00.003+11:00

And some griping! First up the griping. I bought our favourite coffee the other day. I was excited because it was on special for almost $1.50 cheaper than usual and given that it's about $8 something for 100g it's kind of expensive!

Anyway, I got it home and thought it looked wrong. I wasn't sure how. Just wrong. As I put it away I grabbed the last jar out of the cupboard so I could put it in front of the new jar and it felt huge! When I got them both out (because of course by now I was curious) I noticed that the new coffee contained only 80g, not the usual 100g and while it was on special this week, normally it won't be. This makes me SO mad! Where do big companies get off, downsizing their products and then charging the same amount of money for the new smaller size. Do they think we just won't notice? Or that it's not worth complaining for 20g of coffee (or whatever else is is we're buying)? Shame on them! (Just for the record, the company in question this time is Nescafe'). There was a kerfufel recently about the Aussie made Vegemite doing a similar thing and getting rid of the most popular sized jar of vegemite, leaving consumers paying almost the same amount of money for a tiny jar or buying a whopping family sized jar for double the price of the one they got rid of. Not really much of a choice is it?

Anyway, moaning aside, dinner last night was something different. Lentil, Olive and Pumpkin Lasagna. It was good, but I think it would be better with slightly less liquid and at least double the lentils. I'd also leave out the parsley next time, it didn't really suit the dish and lastly I doubled the fetta cheese to make a layer of cheese in the centre. Again, this is easily veganisable for those who can eat soy, just use tofu fetta. For those of you who would like the original recipe you can find it here.
Actually I meant to say that I found this the other day. Wouldn't it be nice if all those companies out there who produce tofu and tempeh etc get on board with this and then all us soy allergic people could be free to eat just about anything again? Well, one can only hope I guess.

Vast amounts of Veganomicon and VwaV...

2008-02-23T19:44:00.003+11:00

This week I've actually managed to cook some things that weren't repeats (woo hoo!) First up was Tomato Couscous from Veganomicon. Mr Un-Veg wasn't a fan (he doesn't like capers or anything that's really tomatoey which is a shame cause I love them both and cook with them a lot! :P) We had this as a side dish and it was good, but it needed a little something. The next day for lunch I reheated it but threw in some sliced Kalamata Olives. Mmmmm it was absolutely perfect that way so I'll definitely make it again, but it will definitely have olives (much to the Un-Veg's horror, you should see him when I dish up Puttanesca!!)
Next was Potato and Kale Enchaladas. Also from Veganomicon. I don't know what happened but mine came out looking all cracked like a desert which is weird because they weren't actually dry, despite their parched appearance.
Sadly when I dished them up this happened:
I really hate it when food does that. Worse still, these were a LOT of work and when I spend that much time and effort making something I at least want it to look pretty. But despite them collapsing they were delicious! And the filling! Oh my heck! That filling! I think I'll happily serve it up on it's own sometime!

Today I wanted to bake muffins. The last 2 batches I cooked weren't favourites around here. The ginger one's I blogged about not so long ago didn't go down so well (apparently I'm the only ginger fan around this place) and then I made some pumpkin muffins which are usually adored, but I frigged them up so there were little chunky bits of rice cereal in them (don't ask). This time I decided to pick something specifically for Mr Un-Veg who's been requesting chocolate and yumminess.

Would you believe, I still have many, many untried VwaV recipes? So I'm sorry if these are old news but I cannot believe that I have somehow skipped over these for so incredibly long!!! Mocha Chocolate Choc Chip Muffins. Heaven in a muffin and if you eat them hot with ice cream they're just like a muffin brownie! Mmmmm.....
If you want the recipe for these and don't have VwaV you can find it here.

Dinner tonight was another Veganomicon success. The more things I cook from this cookbook, the more I love it! Not everything has been the most amazing thing we've ever had but I still haven't had a single disaster out of it and the only things that haven't been amazing have all been down to personal likes/dislikes. I just wish I could eat some of the yummy sounding tofu dishes ::sob:: Anyway, dinner was Vodka Penne which was wonderfully easy, but probably not something I'd make ALL the time, only because I don't drink and the 1/4 cup of vodka the recipe called for cost me $5.99 (I guess you're supposed to buy in bulk but I rarely cook with alcohol because it really doesn't agree with me at all, even with the alcohol burned off). Even Mr Un-Veg liked this one. The only change I made was using paprika instead of chilli and almond meal instead of the almonds (because my blender broke). I think the almond meal worked pretty well. The sauce looked a teeny bit grainy but it didn't feel that way when you ate it.

Butter Chicken (seitan)..

2008-02-22T14:42:00.002+11:00

This recipe was one of my absolute favourites when I was omni. I felt very devastated I'd never eat it again because to be honest, the idea of it with seitan just didn't seem to appeal.

Then I discovered DEOTS II chicken seitan and I can't get enough of it! (well technically I can, but suddenly I am enjoying a whole lot of recipes I'd discarded earlier).

Admittedly this is another vegetarian recipe but again, it's easily veganisable by using soy yoghurt (or another yoghurt alternative~note that I haven't tried it yet with a non soy non dairy alternative). It was for the whole family so not a time to go experimenting with cashew yoghurt. Anyway, it turned out really yummy and was very similar to the omni version (minus the fat from chicken thigh fillets and the torture of death).

Butter Chicken
Preparation: 10 minutes
Total cooking time: 35 minutes
Serves 4-6

2 Tbsp Peanut Oil
1 batch Seitan O Greatness (or 2-3 cups of your favourite chicken seitan), diced into small squares
60g Margarine or Butter (if you use butter, weird as it sounds I don't, even though I eat some dairy and the occasional egg)
2 tsp Garam Masala
2 tsp Sweet Paprika
2 tsp Ground Coriander
1 Tbsp finely chopped fresh Ginger
1/4 tsp Chilli Powder (omit if you're a wimp like me)
1 Cinnamon Stick
6 Cardamom Pods, bruised (do this by squashing a bit with the flat edge of a large knife)
350g Tomatoes, pureed
1 Tbsp Sugar
1/4 cup (60g) plain Yoghurt (or soy yogurt or nut milk thickened with corn flour/cornstarch)
1/2 cup (125ml) Cream (or thick soy or almond cream or cashew nut cream or if you're lucky and live in the states, mimicream which makes me superbly jealous!)
1 Tbsp Lemon Juice

Heat a large saucepan or frying pan (or preferably a wok if you have one, mine died) and add 1 Tbsp of the oil. Add the seitan and fry the seitan for a few minutes until it crisps slightly on the edges. Remove from the pan.

Lower the heat and add the margarine or butter and melt. Add the spices (all of them) and fry them gently for about 1 minute or until they are fragrant. Return the seitan to the pan and coat it in the spice mix.

Add the tomatoes and the sugar and bring to a boil. Lower heat again and simmer, stirring frequently, for 15 minutes or until the sauce has thickened. Add the yoghurt, cream and juice and stir for 5 minutes or until the sauce has re-thickened somewhat.

Remove the cinnamon stick and cardamom pods (don't worry if you can't find them, just spit them out, they won't hurt you) and serve over rice.

In other news, today I picked up, from my local library, The Joy of Vegan Baking. I have no idea what to make first, but oh my there's some yumminess encased in it's pages!

Sick Little Vegemite food....

2008-02-17T12:01:00.002+11:00

3 nights ago I had a scratchy throat but put it down to allergies. I mean, we're in the final 2 weeks of summer. Who gets a cold in the final 2 weeks of summer?!?! Not me! I get the FLU in the final 2 weeks of summer (thanks rugrats who seem to be a whole lot healthier than I am with this thing but are sick enough to share the love.......errm germs!)!!! Luckily it's not very hot (about 22C yesterday) which means I could have sick comfort food.

Now normally I loathe soup with a passion. There's just something not right about my veggies all smooshed up with a bunch of water and herbs and trying to call itself a meal (now don't get me wrong, I understand that people like soup and that's fine by me, but it's just not for me). Anyway, getting sidetracked. I knew I wanted potatoes (ultimate comfort food right?) and garlic because garlic is good for a cold right? (right? I am not actually sure on this, but it's a good excuse to throw a bunch of garlic in my dinner ::grin::)

So I did some googling and decided on Roasted Garlic and Potato Soup. Most recipes called for cream which I didn't really feel like in my dinner. Potatoes are creamy enough on their own me thinks, so I stumbled across this recipe here and decided to give it a try.

The verdict? I still loathe soup with a passion, which is usually what I discover every time I think I want soup. To top off my wonderful soup experience, I lost my taste buds last night, meaning I couldn't taste a darn thing, so this soup pretty much felt like some sort of weird sludge going down the back of my throat. In desperation I threw in a bit of grated cheese but that really just made the whole gloppy mess worse somehow and it went in the bin. Now it had smelled great while I was cooking it, and it tasted somewhat okay at lunch time, but yeah, by dinner when I reheated it, blech and that was with no taste left! Today, just the thought of it, makes me feel unbearably nauseaus. I've included a pic so you can all hail it's gross-ness along with me.
With it I served this bread that I found on Boo's Veganut Blog. It caught my eye ages ago but I never seemed to get organized to make it. So yesterday I put all the dry ingredients into the bread maker and this morning all I had to do was chuck in the water and molasses. I don't know if I did something wrong but the dough was super sticky when I got it out of the bread machine. I kneaded a few extra tablespoons of whole wheat flour into it but it was still sticky so I just threw it into the bread pan and hoped for the best! It came out of the oven looking great, although not as crusty on the outside as I like my bread, but I eat it toasted with soup anyway. I was right though, it's kind of gluten-ey (which I'm 100% sure is my fault! I plan to try this again and will hopefully do a better job! I seem to always stuff up cookies and bread).
I promised disasters didn't I? Boy do I deliver!!

I also whipped up some of my Mum's ice cream, which is anything but vegan, but decadently delicious none the less. I promise I'll redeem myself soon by posting it in all it's yumminess (along with a pretty successful attempt at butter chicken~minus the chicken of course, and easily veganisable!)

Linguine Paprikash.

2008-02-15T19:54:00.003+11:00

Firstly, a belated Happy Valentines Day to you for yesterday. I didn't post yesterday, because to be honest, I didn't cook (shock, horror!). You see, 10 years ago yesterday, I met my husband and 3 years later, on the same day, we got married. So for me, as cheesey as it is, Valentines Day is my wedding anniversary (but not because it's Valentines Day, just because we happened to meet on that day). So yesterday was spent relaxing and then take away for dinner, which we decided would be pizza.

I called ahead to a local pizza place that we had a pamphlet for (not a big franchised one, this guy owns his own) and asked if they could do a vegetarian pizza as it wasn't on their leaflet. He informed me that he could make any pizza I wanted, cheese, no cheese whatever I liked. I was happy to find not just a place that would make a vegetarian pizza for me, but if I decide one day to take the final step, one that would happily make a vegan pizza for me! And it was good too!
Anyway, it was back to cooking tonight. I decided ages ago that I would like to try Paprikash. As happens frequently these days, I only had vegan recipes and all of them had tofu so I had to go hunting for one that wasn't vegan. To the original recipe I added some chopped mushrooms. It tasted a lot like the stroganoff I make and I think next time I'll add more mushrooms, but it was yummy! It would also be nice with seitan chunks I think. If you want it the original recipe can be found here. It's also easily veganisable (veganizable?) by using tofu sour cream instead of the dairy.

Linguine with Paprikash Sauce
Yield: Makes 5 to 6 servings

340g Linguine
2 medium red Capsicum
1 medium Onion, thinly sliced
1 clove Garlic, minced
300-400g Mushrooms
2 Tbsp Olive Oil
2 Tbsp Plain Flour
4 tsp Sweet Hungarian Paprika
½ tsp Salt
¼ tsp Black Pepper
1 (225g) can Tomato Sauce (puree)
1 cup Vegetable Stock
½ cup Sour Cream

Cook linguine according to package directions. Drain in colander. Place in large warm bowl; keep warm.

Meanwhile, cut capsicum lengthwise into thin strips; cut strips crosswise into halves.

Heat oil in large frying pan (I used water instead of oil) over medium heat until hot. Add capsicum, onion, mushrooms and garlic. Cook while stirring for about 10 minutes or until peppers are very soft (Or you could cheat here and use roasted peppers and just cook it until the onion is soft).

Combine the flour, paprika, salt and black pepper in small bowl. Stir into capsicum mix in the pan. Cook over medium heat for about 3 minutes, stirring occasionally. Combine tomato sauce and broth; stir into the frying pan. Bring to a boil; stirring constantly. Reduce heat to low and simmer, uncovered, until sauce thickens.

Remove frying pan from the heat; place the sour cream in a small bowl. Stir in several spoonfuls of the capsicum mixture. Stir sour cream mixture into sauce in pan. Cook over low heat 1 minute or until heated through. Do not boil. Pour over linguine, toss if desired.

Running out of titles...and Rosewater Pisachio Pizza.

2008-02-12T19:50:00.000+11:00

for my blog posts! My creative juices must be drying up :P

Sorry again for the lack of blog posts. I seem to be stuck in a rut of cooking old favourites and I'm also busy trying to empty out my overstocked freezer! Every time I cook I make the mistake of keeping leftovers (by cooking for 4 then I get 3 freezer meals). Only problem is my freezer meals are currently out of control and some must be eaten!

Anyway, amongst these frozen...errrm....delights I've made some burger patties. I got the recipe from here. They tasted nice, although I'm not sure on the crispy skin they kind of got on the outside. I'll see how they are when I reheat one. I also changed it slightly by cooking the veggies and garlic before I made the burger (I don't trust my oven to cook them so they were soft).
I made some Ginger Muffins from the Joy of Vegan Baking (I got the recipe from amazon.com while browsing the book :P). I have this book on order from the library and can't wait. I used less sugar than they called for and used half wholemeal spelt flour, half normal white flour. I loved them. The family not so much (but I'm a real ginger addict). They have lemon in them which I wasn't so keen on. I plan to do some fiddling soon with the recipe and once I've got them how I like them I'll pass on a recipe:
Julie's sausages again from Every Day Dish, this time as actual sausages. I just fried them up with a bit of non stick spray in a frying pan and they were perfect! I'd love to put them in the George Foreman but Mr Un-Veg has gunked it all up with meat grease (eeewww!). In the background is Isa's Spinach and Millet Polenta. I still love this stuff:
Last but not least I decided to try my hand at a different type of cookie. I tend to stick to chocolate and choc chip one's. So I flipped through Veganomicon and decided on Pistachio Rosewater cookies. I think I did everything right. I was pretty careful although I used almond milk~read that a tablespoon of almond meal in the dry ingredients and water in the wet (I think the recipe called for rice milk?). The recipe said they wouldn't spread, so I put them fairly close together and because I threw out my beat up old cookie tray when we moved I put them on a pizza tray (same thing right? Only round!). In the oven they went. They smelled heavenly! Once the timer went off I opened the door expecting perfection and instead I was met with:
Pistachio Rosewater Pizza. Oh well, thank goodness for knives (and they still tasted great, they just didn't look so pretty! and yes, that's a blank one, I'm not usually a fan of nuts on cookies so I wanted to try a naked one).

Wimps Chilli, Cheats Rice and Scrumptious Cornbread...

2008-02-07T16:46:00.000+11:00

Tonight I wanted Cornbread. To be specific, I wanted the cornbread from DEOTS II (minus the sugar, turns out I only like savoury cornbread). The thing is, I had no idea what to eat with it! Seems that cornbread is another traditional American food, not so much in Australia (in fact, before I became vegetarian I'd never eaten it before...ever). So I turned to my trusty google and discovered that chilli seems to be the most popular choice, along with stew and soup. Soup is out, I don't like end..the end. Stew is great, but not so much in the middle of summer. Admittedly it's been raining for 3 days and has cooled off a fair bit but it's not cold or anything. So chilli it was!

Hmmm except I'm a big wimp and can't handle chilli. What to do? Heatless chilli (aka chilli for wimps). I knew I wanted my favourite bean (Black Turtle Beans) to play a big part in this dish so I went on the hunt for Black Bean Chilli and came across this. Some slight alterations: halved the recipe, otherwise I'd be eating chilli for the next year or two. I removed all traces of chilli and used slightly less (eyeballed) than a tablespoon of paprika and the other spices. I left out the coriander, only because I didn't have any and they don't sell it at the local store and I didn't want to go into the mall.

This was pretty good (I think, given that I've never eaten chilli before I actually had nothing to compare it to). It was comfort food (again with the comfort food!) and I loved it. I have 2 more boxes of it in the freezer for can't be bothered to cook nights (only problem is we have so many boxes of can't be bothered to cook things that there's absolutely no room left for anything, so we're going to have to start eating it all!)

I served it up with cheats rice, which is rice in a bag that you microwave for 90 seconds and voila! You have whole grain cooked rice (I don't normally go to the expense of these but I like to have them in the cupboard for the odd occasion I want to be lazy or I need cooked rice and I need it NOW!) and of course with the Spoon cornbread from DEOTS II (I had no idea how addicted I would become to cornbread with the discovery of this~the best bit? No dry bits! It's all tender and moist and scrumptious!).

On the Roon (charlotte) front, she's still holding down her food. She has errm a slight leakage problem (maybe from the enema? or the laxatives?) that I'll be calling the vet about tomorrow if it hasn't fixed itself, but it's not terrible or anything, very minor. She's still very quiet and hiding in the laundry and stuff which worries me, but she otherwise seems okay.

Thoughts for Charlotte please....

2008-02-05T11:35:00.000+11:00

Hi guys. Thank you all for your wonderful comments on my last post. I'm sorry that I have not answered them yet, I want to take the time to get back to them properly.

I just wanted to ask you, all my blogging friends, to please keep my kitty Charlotte in your thoughts today. She got sick 3 nights ago, throwing up. I took her to the vet yesterday and he thinks she has a hairball that is blocking her intestine. He gave her some laxative and she had another 2 doses at home and nothing happened so she went back today.

This afternoon she's having a "colonic" to try and flush out the blockage. She may or may not need an x-ray to see what's going on. This colonic is costing us around $300 (more than we have right now with 3 rugrats who've just started school). If it doesn't work and the blockage is in her small intestine instead of her large, she'll need surgery. For that we're looking at a minimum of $900.

Honestly, it's unlikely there is any way we could come up with that sort of money in any sort of time frame that would help Charlotte. I don't know what we're going to do if the worst happens and I've been absolutely devastated all day.

So if you could, please, just keep her in your thoughts and hope for the colonic to do it's stuff and for her to come home this afternoon feeling better. You guys are so awesome I just know that the power of all of your positive thoughts will help.

I promise I'll get back to comments as soon as I can.

ETA: I just heard from the vet. There is no blockage which means we now have no idea what is going on with her. He hasn't checked her small intestine but he did feel around very carefully and doesn't believe there's an obstruction. She's staying over night so he can see what she's up to and her behaviour etc and is taking a full set of bloodwork. He's also starting her on antibiotics but as he said, he can't promise that the bloods will show anything or that the antibiotics will do much :(

ETA II: Okay, we collected our girl today. She's doing okay. The bloods showed nothing much except a little dehydration so that's been treated and she's eaten 2 small meals since she got back at lunchtime and managed to hold them in. She's sleeping happily on the lounge curled in a ball. She has a shaved neck from one of the IV lines (why are shaved kitties so kiss-able?!?!). So long as she stays as good as she is, we're assuming there was a hairball but she's coughed it up somewhere and it's made her feel sick for a day or 2 afterwards. If she gets sick again it's back to the vet, who I just have to say has been absolutely wonderful. All up her tests etc came to much much more than he charged me and he's nice to boot! (Ever notice a lot of vets are cranky and have zero people skills? He's not one of them and you don't get the impression he's trying to throw you out the door quickly so he can move on to his next patient).

Thanks again for all the concern and well wishes for her. I've no doubt it's what's helped her to get well again. In the mean time we're enjoying the super friendly girl who's come home (I give it 8 hours before she's back to her cranky self :P) I'll keep you all updated on how she's doing and bring you some food soon (been too stressed to do much cooking or anything exciting anyway).

Pumpkin Loaf, Pyjamas and Pies....

2008-02-02T15:11:00.000+11:00

I've been busy again and slack with blogging again.

From Susans Fat Free Vegan Kitchen Blog, Pumpkin Spice Loaf. This was wonderful. I made 3 mini loaves and a heart bundt shape (mini and only because I'd run out of mini loaf pans). I had only one gripe with this. I couldn't stop eating it....
I healthified it further by using 1/2 of the total flour amount whole wheat flour and the rest white pastry flour and I couldn't tell there was wholemeal in there. I went for the oil option. Next time I think I'll use less sugar, not a lot less but a little.

Dinner the other night was V'con Samosa Baked Potatoes. These were super yummy, except I'm a green pea-a-phobe so mine had corn kernals instead of peas. My taties also could have been bigger but I was having trouble finding decent potatoes, sigh:
Having had such wonderful success with Julies sausages the other night I decided to try and come up with a seitan chicken breast. This was the result:
What to do with it? First schnitzel it:
Then turn it into Chicken Pyjama's (inspired by Amy from The Reluctant Vegan and her chickpea cutlet pj's):

The taste was absolutely perfect for it. One gripe (yes, I seem to like that word at the moment), the texture was way too soft. My mixture was quite wet when I started so it could have been that, it could have been the addition of chickpea flour to the gluten flour, it could have been the new gluten flour I bought or it could have just been that I was off in the amount of liquids I added. More fiddling, then I'll share the recipe (or if you really want I'll share it as is if I can remember it and you guys can fiddle). I might try baking it next time too.

Here it is next to Mr Omni's (sorry for the meat shot, but can you tell which is which?):
And the insides:
Last but not least I had my 2nd pie from the Byron Bay Pie Company I blogged about before. This one was curried lentil. The insides were delicious. Sadly I wasn't a fan of the crust. It was some type of spelt crust and it was thick, dense and heavy, not all flakey and yummy the way I like my pie crust to be. It was okay when smothered in the lentil mix, maybe it had to be heavier to hold the insides ...ermm...inside:
The inside shot (another word I like today obviously!):
Alrighty, I've not cooked much the last couple of days. The baby rugrats started school for the first time (leaving me at home alone and devastated) and the Un-Veg is away for work. I did make some veggie burgers I haven't tried before today. I'm not sure how they've turned out yet. I guess if I blog about them they're okay (either that or I'm showing you my disaster!)

Food Overload

2008-01-28T14:54:00.000+11:00

I have obviously gotten lazy with blogging. I just went through my "for my blog" folder and it's starting to get over~run. So time to share me thinks.

First was dinner the other night. It was a very Veganomicon dinner. I made the Panko Stuffed Mushrooms (which I liked a lot but were an even bigger hit with Mr Un-Veg) and the Spinach and Tomato Saute (is that the proper name? Will have to check). I just threw some baby corn (yes, I know most of the veg world are haters, but it's adored around this place by all of us :P) in the microwave until it was tender. Excuse the steam, I was hungry:
The other day I made some Bubble Tea. I sort of followed the directions from here but the recipe for the chai mix is Lolo's from Vegan Yum Yum (sorry, but you'll have to wait and see if her book comes out). It's similar to the ones' in the link though. I used Rooibos tea this time. It's SO yummy (and I am a total tea hater, especially herbal tea, blergh!) The Chai Rooibos came out amazingly delicious. I've been drinking a glass of it with lunch. The best thing is it's as good as water (so long as you don't over load it with sugar but it's sweet naturally anyway) according to the box and has other benefits too (but I'm boring and can't be bothered to read up about them all nor share them with you, go forth and search google if you're interested :P) Only thing is, it turns out I'm not much of a fan of the "bubbles" so I probably won't bother with them again. I put them in there cause they look pretty but they go in the bin (cause no one else likes them either! They're kind of like balls of snot):
I made some Vanilla Pudding from Jamie at Home. But I couldn't leave it alone, I added some vanilla to it cause I didn't have vanilla sugar, I added a bit of cornstarch cause it wasn't thickening and I put too much nutmeg on top. I don't think I'll try it again anyway, it wasn't nearly sweet enough for me, mostly just tasted like rice with boiled milk (ick). It looked pretty though:
Last up (well 2nd last) I made Julies sausages from Every Day Dish. These are absolutely amazing. I halved the recipe because I knew I'd be eating 8 sausages for ever. They're the teeniest bit spicy for me but otherwise are absolutely perfect and they don't have that seitany taste that so many of my seitans seem to have. Here they are just out of the steamer. I don't have a double steamer like Julie so I threw them into a bamboo steamer over a pot of water (with a cookie rack to sit the steamer on~worked perfectly):
Okay, so I had these 4 glorious sausages. What to do with them? Well, ever since I got it I'd been dying to try the Biscuits with White Bean Sausage Gravy from VwaV, only problem was the sausage crumbles had tempeh so I couldn't eat it and I didn't know what to substitute them with that wasn't soy. Julies sausages were absolutely perfect for this dish. I just crumbled them up in the food processor and cooked them quickly in a frying pan to brown them before I threw the gravy on top and heated it through. It looks a bit thick in the photo because I was busy cooking Mr Un-Veg's dinner as well and it sat there heating for quite a while (grrrr!). These are going to open up so many new recipes for me. Now all I need her to come up with is soy free bacon ;D

I have decided that I very much like American comfort food. It was interesting to see what a biscuit was finally. It's kind of like a cross between a scone and a cookie (only not sweet). Yum, I'll definitely be having this again, although I'll leave all the salt out next time, for some reason it was pretty salty (and it wasn't the sausages because I hadn't put salt in them):

Gingerbread Muffins and Spices...

2008-01-26T08:53:00.000+11:00

As promised....the baking! I got all inspired by Elizabeth over at Veggiegirl a while back, she had made some gingerbread and was putting maple butter on it. Alas I could only find one jar of maple butter on the internet, available in Australia and it was $15 for a jar the size of my thumbnail. Maybe one day, but for the moment I put it off.

Anyway, I'd found these ages ago by Anna from The Village Vegan. They were quick to make and soooooo delicious. I adore gingerbread, except for some reason I've never been a big fan of it in cookies. I over-cooked them by about 5 minutes (my fault, I checked them and even though I knew deep down they were done but for some idiotic reason stuck them back in anyway) so they were quite firm. Next time I'll get them out when I should but they were still amazingly yummy.

They were gone in less than 24 hours. We cut them in half and dished them up with a teeny spread of margarine (seeing as I was a dim wit when it came to cooking them). Fabulous. If you haven't made these before you have to try them! Mine don't look as nice because I whizzed the oat topping a little in the food processor, I should have left it whole.

Another thing I'd been trying to do lately was organize my spices and herbs. I was tired of having to dig out what I needed from those teeny little shop jars with a 1/4 teaspoon measure because nothing bigger would fit in. But what to do?

Then I read a conversation on the PPK forum about Indian Spice Tins. It sounded wonderful so I did a bit of research and figured out it was going to be $35 for a large tin and would hold 7 spices. I couldn't decide.

Then while I was at Big W the other day and came across these little stainless steel tins with a clear lid and a magnet on the bottom. I grabbed a couple thinking they would come in handy for something and when I got home decided to throw a couple of my spices in there.

Well, it worked perfectly! Large top, easily opened and because of the magnet I can stick them most places, they also stack on top of each other well, because the magnet holds them together.

So off I went and bought a stack more (actually I bought out the whole shops' supply!). The total cost came in at $38 but instead of holding 7 spices, I got 24 tins, so all the spices I use on any sort of a regular basis are catered for.

Now where to stick 'em. I put them on the fridge, but it felt a bit dodgy and I was worried one of the rug rats would fling the freezer door open and a paprika disaster would ensue in my kitchen leaving me to take care of the devastation. So I looked around the kitchen and spied the stainless steel rangehood..........

Perfect!

Coconut Coriander Lime Cashew Lentils....

2008-01-23T15:57:00.000+11:00

From Extraveganza, only I left out the cashews because I'm not a fan of nuts in my lentils (it's baby food mush all the way baby!). I was lucky enough to find this book at the library but when the budget allows I'm thinking I may buy a copy. There's loads and loads in here that sounds really yummy and I have a billion pages tabbed to try. Only thing is there's a whole section on cheesecake and they're ALL made with tofu. Oh well, there's tofu in every vegan book I guess (well most of them). One thing I have noticed with this book, is every single recipe just about has a very long winded name (not so great when you're trying to remember the exact name off the top of your head cause you're too lazy to go and check!).

All in all I was pretty impressed with these, although next time I'll fry my spices until fragrant without the lentils in there as well. All they did was stick, stick, stick. They were easy to make though and once cooked, real wintery comfort food. The only thing I was unsure about was the red lentils. It didn't specify if they were meant to be split lentils or whole, I guessed and went with split. If you have this book and haven't made these yet, go ahead and make them!

Again with the lack of updates, except this time it's been due to utter laziness. I actually made these 4 or 5 nights ago (see! I can't even remember!!). I have some yummy baking on it's way soon though (yes, I already baked it/them) so stay tuned :P

Seitan and Mushroom Pot Pies....

2008-01-18T09:19:00.000+11:00

I'm kind of running behind with blogging my meals lately. We've had repeats and I've had disasters (someone remind me NOT to make Ethiopian Split Peas again! BLECH! And ESPECIALLY not with GREEN split peas instead of yellow cause I read the recipe wrong, double blech! On the upside I have realized that if I soak my lentils for a couple of hours before making Tamarind Lentils from V'Con that it cuts the cooking time by a TONNE and I don't end up with little Tamarind Pebbles! (woo hoo!)

It also turns out we discovered that one of the twins appears to have an allergy to banana's and oranges. We got quite a scare the other morning when J tucked into a piece of orange only to come out in large hot hives on each side of her face and started screaming in pain.

We already knew I has an allergy to kiwi fruit because since she was small, she breaks out in big white and red welts all over her hands where-ever the fruit has touched her skin. Given that all 3 of my kids have as many digestive issues as I do it looks like we might be in for some family testing (gosh, my blogs suddenly becoming the food allergy families survival guide :P). Enough about health though, you're here to read about food.

These were something that I came up with when I decided to make a casserole for Mr Un-Veg. They turned out pretty well, even the kidlets ate them (well J did, she LOVES "fake meat"). Funny enough they were all fighting over who got the one with seitan in it!! I do recommend serving them up like I did with garlic mashed potatoes, the two just went really well together, much nicer than it on it's own (although it was still fairly yummy on it's own). Feel free to throw in extra spices etc. I used a really basic gravy this time but next time I think I'll get a bit fancier with it and use my favourite gravy.
Seitan and Mushroom Pot Pies
Serves approx 4

2-3 cups diced Seitan (I used Seitan O' Greatness original)
400g Mushrooms, slice half of them thinly and half of them in wedges
1/3 cup Flour
1 1/2 cups boiling Water
60g Margarine
2 cloves Garlic, crushed
1 brown Onion, diced
1 1/2 tsp Vegetable Stock Powder
1-2 sheets Puff Pastry, partially thawed
Rice Milk for basting (or any other type of Non Dairy Milk)

Melt half the margarine in a heavy based saucepan over medium heat. Add onion and garlic and fry gently for 5-10 minutes or until onion softens and becomes translucent. Add the mushrooms, both the wedges and the slices and cook until they just start to soften. Remove all from pan.

Melt the other half of the margarine. Add flour and cook for approx. 1 minute to make a roux. Slowly add small splashes of the boiling water, whisking all the time to prevent lumps, until all the water has been added (if it looks really thick feel free to add a bit more water). Throw in the vegetable stock powder and bring the whole lot to the boil. Once boiling add in the seitan and mushroom and onion mixture and simmer for a couple of minutes. Remove from the heat and allow to cool for approximately 10 minutes.

While it is cooling turn a ramekin upside down on the pastry and cut out a circle the size of the top of the ramekin. Fill the ramekin most of the way to the top and place the circle of pastry on top. Brush it with a little rice milk and bake in a preheated 180C oven for 30-40 minutes (turn it up to 200C in the last 10 minutes if the pastry isn't puffing properly) until golden brown and puffed.

For Garlic Mashed Potatoes simply fry 1 tsp of minced Garlic in a Tbsp of Olive Oil while you are boiling 4 large white Potatoes, for a minute or so, careful not to burn it. Drain the potatoes once done and mash with the garlic, a dab of margarine and some (non dairy) milk.

Once served pull the lid off your pie and scoop in the potato. Mmmm good!

As a final note, if you leave your pastry on the bench to defrost, please keep an eye on it:
What's that funny mark you ask? Hmmmm TOBY!!!!

Mum's Best Ever Potato Salad...

2008-01-15T15:50:00.000+11:00

My Mum has been making this potato salad since I was little. It's always been a family favourite (and if you can tolerate soy sour cream and leave out the egg, it's easily veganizable). We all have little bits and pieces we leave out. My husband likes his potatoes cooked extra soft, my little brother doesn't like the celery and I love it as is. It needs a bit of chilling time but it's really not much work and on a hot summer day goes down really well with a lentil pattie or something.

Mum's Best Ever Potato Salad

4-6 medium-large potatoes (about 800g)
3-4 stalks Celery, sliced into semi-circles
3 hard boiled Eggs, chopped
1 250g tub Sour Cream
About 250g Mayonnaise

Peel and dice potatoes. Boil for about 15 minutes or until desired softness is achieved (Mr Un-Veg likes them falling apart which makes the salad kind of fluffy and hard to toss but anyway). Drain potatoes well, rinse under cold water and put in fridge to cool thoroughly.

Once cool add celery to taste and the eggs.

In a separate bowl throw the tub of sour cream and an equivalent amount of mayonnaise together and mix well. Throw this over the salad and toss to combine.

If you like you can chill it further otherwise just dish it up.

I had it with "Oh crumbs! I forgot my lentil pattie" lentil patties which were basically one tin of drained lentils, 1/4 cup Oats, a good shake of breadcrumbs, 1 tsp grated Ginger, 1 clove crushed garlic and about 1/8 tsp Celery Salt and a tablespoon of mayonnaise all whizzed up in the food processor. Then I coated them in crumbs. They were a little soft but they tasted good for a super quick throw together kind of a thing.

BEHOLD.... the Fudgety Gooeyness...

2008-01-11T17:27:00.000+11:00

Diagnosis: PMS and general malaise....

Prescription: Veganomicon...

Solution: Fudgy Wudgy Blueberry Brownies (or in my case Fudgy Wudgy Cherry-liscious Brownies).
Verdict: Mmmmmm. Problem solved.

(I will NEVER again in this lifetime, eat any brownie except these!!)

Of things health related...

2008-01-09T09:26:00.000+11:00

I'm going to deviate from food somewhat with this post. Firstly thank you all for your encouragement about me trying to be more healthy. Turns out it may not happen, at least not in the way I was planning.

I don't talk about it a lot but I have mentioned in the past that I have IBS (Irritable Bowel Syndrome~gotta love that title when people ask what's wrong with you!!!). In the lead up to my diagnosis I had every test imaginable to determine what was wrong with me. I won't go into detail, most of them were unpleasant at best and downright gross and painful at worst.

Anyway, I'm already pretty sure that I have food intolerances to certain types of foods (predominantly an amine intolerance which is a food chemical found in many types of foods, natural one's like vegetables and fruit, banana's and avocado's affect me the most) and I've long suspected I've had an issue with fruit and have just not eaten fruit (yes NOT eaten ANY fruit, save the odd sultana in a muffin) for about 10 years (are you all dying of shock and horror yet? I do eat loads of veggies and other healthy stuff to replace what I don't get in fruit and don't worry, I didn't do this without speaking to my doctor first and I also have regular blood work done to check my levels of everything are okay).

To cut a long story short, I managed to eat that mango from my last blog post, some coconut cream (which you also saw) about 5 dates and 5 tablespoons of fructose sweetened (cashew) ice cream (more on cashew ice cream later, I think I've hit the jackpot on that one!) and I have been quite sick and miserable ever since. Today (day 3) I'm finally starting to feel somewhat human and not quite so dodgy in the belly. When I read up about fructose malabsorption a little lightbulb kind of went "aha" on a lot of things for me. I'm not going to read too much into it yet, been there done that one before in the past. So what does all this mean?

It means me asking you all to bear with me if I'm slow at updating for a little while because after this I plan to have more testing done (sigh). It's not a big test, but I'm not sure how long it will take to get done and in the meantime I'm feeling very wary of a lot of foods. On top of not being able to eat soy and all the other things I have mentioned above plus being super careful with beans in general I'm not feeling like there's an awful lot of interesting to eat right now.

Don't worry, I still plan to cook! Maybe just don't expect the healthy that I promised :P No point being healthy if you're too sick to enjoy it right?

Anyway, I hope to have some interesting food posts coming up as soon as I'm feeling a little better than I do (been eating a LOT of bland and boring food around here the last couple of days!!!).

And just because I hate boring you all with non food related posts here's some cuteness to cheer you all up :P

Kitty and Turtle get to know each other. This was so adorable, they sat there eyeing each other off for about 10 minutes, I was so paranoid Charlotte would pounce on him but she was actually lying down on her side and not looking that interested other than staring at him:
And Tom Tom gives you a big smile and says hello:

Simplicity....

2008-01-05T19:17:00.000+11:00

Sometimes all you need is something simple and it's so much better than extravagance.

I'm not one for New Years Resolutions. I believe (for me) that they are something I decide I'll do and in 3 days I'm done with it already. That being said, I have been thinking long and hard about my diet the last few weeks (probably why I've not food porned much!).

I could go on and on (well I started to but deleted it all) about how I've been gaining weight, blah blah blah, but what it boils down to is that for at least the next month, I have 3 kids in my care, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and I cannot afford expensive exercise equipment. I plan to exercise once they are all at school but in the mean time I think that it's time for a little bit of a diet makeover (don't go! Let me explain!). I really only have 5kgs I'd like to shift so it's not going to be a massive overhaul.

For the most part, since I went vegetarian I have been discovering the joys of sugar and fat (as is probably evident by what I post all the time). All I plan to do is not so much reduce the fat content, but shift it, eating healthier fats like avocados, seeds and nuts instead of dairy and margarine (there will still be room for a little margarine of course, I'm not one to be miserable).

Secondly I would like to try and reduce my dairy intake further. I'm not saying that I am from here on in going to be 100% vegan (that will come, baby steps!) but when things get busy and I get lazy I tend to rely on dairy way too much and I would like to try and stop that and explore some of the different sorts of ways to replace it (well not replace as such but just add in more variety).

Lastly....baking......yes, I still plan to bake! I love, love, love to bake. I might ease up on the bikkies and cookies a little because of the fat content of them but as far as muffins, sweet loaves, bread and the like go, keep expecting yummies. I have a secret weapon under my belt (ahh! so that's what those extra few kilo's are!!). Actually I have a couple of secret weapons that are going to healthify my baking while continuing to keep it delicious! But you'll have to stay tuned for that :P (Gotta keep you all around somehow right?)

Following on from all this (yes, there is food, not much but food all the same) I decided to try my hand at a raw dessert. Ever notice that raw desserts don't contain masses and masses of refined sugar? Mostly they aren't super low in fat, calories or sugars but the fat comes from good fats and the calories and sugar come from fruits, there by getting you (meaning me) off the never ending roller coaster of sugar highs (and lows.....and errm highs.....and lows).

This is anything but fat free but I made only a single serve so the fat content of the whole thing is only 3/4 cup of mushed cashews and 1/8 cup (about 3/4 of that actually) of coconut oil. I made a raw mini cheesecake. Problem is I don't like it :P I'm not keen on the texture of the cashews and I don't like the inclusion of coconut oil and lemon at all! Suffice to say, I won't be making it quite like this again. The cogs however, are turning on ways that I can twist this into a non raw cheesecake dessert. Again, I'll get back to you if that happens! (Excuse it's nakedness, once I realized I wasn't a fan I got lazy with making it pretty. It's now sitting in my fridge with me wondering what I can do to it to make it palatable, crummy photo anyway, it's been overcast and raining most of the day and a sauna in between!):
Simplicity you are thinking....she said simplicity and so far nothing simple here. Well yes, yes there is. Last nights dessert. Fresh mango squares topped with a dab of coconut whipped cream:
Mmmmm delicious. Sometimes simple is best!

For whipped coconut cream, simply throw a can of coconut cream in the fridge for 24 hours or so. Do not shake it, crack open the tin and scoop out the solidified cream on top. To the cream from 1 can add 1 tsp icing sugar (confectioners sugar) and whip with electric beaters (or a whisk) until fluffy looking. If it gets too liquid chuck it back in the fridge for a little while.

A couple of notes on this, try not to scoop out much of the water underneath the cream if any at all otherwise it will just be a runny mess. Also only some brands of coconut cream separate and solidify. Most of the one's in Australia do, except Ayam. If you find one that works, stick to it!

To make up for the lack of food, ever read "My cat likes to hide in boxes"? (unlikely unless you're a parent or have a great memory from childhood!)....well....my cat likes to hide in closets :P

Antipasto Polenta and Stuffed Mushrooms....

2008-01-02T19:00:00.000+11:00

December/January is a big couple of months for me.

For starters, in December, it's my Quit smoking-versary. This years was 2 years on the 20th of December (but I was being slack with my posts so didn't say anything). I'm proud to say that this is it for me. I can honestly say that I will never smoke again. For years I wished I had never taken it up, just because it seemed SO incredibly hard to quit. And it was. Yes, I faltered once or twice, I had numerous ups and downs and got depressed and put on weight. But in the end, you come out the other side, knowing that this is a great thing you have done, not just for yourself, but for those you love who were standing around watching you pay loads of money to kill yourself slowly with some horrid disease.

Secondly you see, it's my Veggie-versary. That being said, I have no idea what actual date is my veggie-versary because I had been doing lot's of reading on the internet for a few weeks before I decided to do it. Then pretty much, I got out of bed one day and decided that was it. This too is something that I can only see as being wonderful. I have learned so much about health, nutrition, the heinous things that humans do to poor defenceless sentient beings and much much more. I have never felt more at peace with my diet (and subsequent extra kilo's-thanks vegan baking!) before. I love it and it's something I just know I am going to love for the rest of my life.

My journey is far from over, it's still just beginning. I have so much more to learn and more things that I want to be careful of (like reading lables better before I eat something, not after!) and many, many more recipes and foods I want to explore.

I also want to say a big thank you to all of you who listen to me blather on and for those of you who blog yourselves, a huge thank you to you too. I love it that your blogs provide inspiration and keep me committed and on the right track with all things vegetarian. Because of you I not only discover new foods daily but I can aspire to one day be free of all animal products, because if you can do it, then surely I can too!

Okay, on to the food.

I've made something similar to this before (Mediterranean Polenta) but this one is vegan (read cheeseless which the other wasn't) and doesn't have artichokes which I've discovered I just don't like. What would be easier to say is it's a little bit different :P

Antipasto Polenta

4 cups Water
1 cup Polenta
6 Spring Onions (Scallions), sliced thinly
8 Sun-Dried Tomatoes, chopped
2 red fire roasted Capsicums (Red Bell Pepper) (you know, the one's in jars?)
3 Tbsp pitted Kalamata Olives, sliced
2 cloves Garlic, crushed
1/2 cup (roughly) Parsley, chopped

Bring the water to the boil in a large heavy bottomed saucepan. Once boiling slowly add a stream of polenta, stirring constantly as you do so. Cook, stirring for 3-10 minutes or until polenta is thick and creamy looking. Remove from the heat, stir through remaining ingredients and set in a shallow baking tray sprayed lightly with non stick spray.

Refrigerate for at least half an hour until it's set.

Heat a non stick frying pan over medium-high heat and spray with olive oil spray. Cut polenta into triangles or squares and fry for a few minutes each side until they crisp up a little and start to turn golden. Serve hot.

Basic Stuffed Mushrooms

4-5 largish stuffable Mushrooms (the kind that have a hollow, not button but not flat either)
5 Tbsp Extra Virgin Olive Oil
2 cloves Garlic, crushed
3 Tbsp chopped fresh Parsley
50g fresh Bread Crumbs (just whiz a thick slice and a half of bread in the processor)
Salt and Pepper

Preheat the oven to 180C. Remove the stalks from the mushrooms (but don't chuck them!) and either wipe or peel the caps as desired. Place upside down on a lightly oil sprayed baking dish.

Chop the mushroom stems finely and put in a bowl with the breadcrumbs, parsley and salt and pepper to taste.

Heat 1 Tbsp of the oil in a non stick frying pan over low-medium heat and fry the garlic gently for a minute or so. Add this to the breadcrumb mixture and another tablespoon of the oil.

Fill the mushroom caps and drizzle the remaining 3 Tbsp of oil around the mushrooms. Bake for 15-20 minutes or until the mushrooms are tender but not soft.

Slackety Slack Slack SLACK!!!

2008-01-01T13:00:00.000+11:00

Most of the time I love to blog. Then for a month or so it suddenly seems like I just can't do it, and my blog sits here singing quietly to me "attention, give me attention!!!!!!!!!!!!" and it just seems like too much effort to update.

Honestly though, there hasn't been that much exciting going on in the kitchen. A number of repeats and shock horror, I actually got lazy with the camera and haven't bothered to photograph a lot of what has been eaten.

I did remember to take a pic of Veganomicon's Fresh Dill Rice with Chickpeas (not it's real name, I've gone blank and being lazy again), only I used cannelini beans because of chickpeas hating me) and served it with a split pea pattie (in the recipe index) and some steamed veggies with Veganomicon's Spiced Yoghurt (which I know Isa would kill me for but I deveganized it by using regular yoghurt). Mr Un-Veg LOVED this yoghurt!
But I really wanted to pop in with a Veganomicon recipe that was yummity yum yum.

The Quinoa Almond Muffins are amazing. They don't rise much at all but they come out of the oven a really dense, super moist perfectly sweet but not too sweet bundle of deliciousness. I had to use a few subs, partly because of the soy thing and partly because of my lack of attention to what I have in the pantry. I basically used strained almond milk instead of the soy, used mostly white flour but made 1/4 cup of that pastry flour to balance out the fact that I threw in 1/4 cup whole wheat flour (I would love to make them with whole wheat pastry flour, alas we don't get it here), used sultana's instead of apricots or currants and made them a bit lower fat by subbing half the oil for applesauce. Mmmm I'm kind of hoping they may encourage me to start eating breakfast (I'm a chronic breakfast skipper) and given that they have zero refined sugar they're not going to send me into outer space on a sugar high either.
Otherwise, I have absolutely nothing to report on but I wanted to wish all of you a Happy New Year! May 2008 and be good to you (mine started in tragedy. I spent it alone and burned my hand on boiling water so my hand was killing me the entire night!)

Mushroom Puffs and Potato Dauphinois..

2007-12-27T19:20:00.000+11:00

Night before last nights dinner was anything but healthy. But it sure was yummy! Not one to be eaten daily however.

First up Mushroom Puffs. These were pretty yummy and versatile. Next time I might add a little bit of chopped seitan and fiddle with the sauce mix a bit but they were good as they were. Start this early, they seal best if you store them in the fridge for an hour after filling them.
Mushroom Puffs

500g frozen Puff Pastry
Small amount non dairy Milk

Filling:
1 Onion, chopped finely
1 carrot, grated coarsely
1 medium Potato, grated coarsely
3 Tbsp Rice Bran, Grapeseed, Canola or Sunflower Oil (something tasteless)
225g Mushrooms, sliced (try to get something meaty, my supermarket only had the normal, swiss brown or portabello would be nice)
2 Tbsp Soy Sauce or Braggs
1 Tbsp Tomato Sauce
1/8 or so (big pinch) Majoram (or Thyme, or whatever Italian herb tickles your fancy)
Salt and Pepper

Cut each square of pastry into 4 15cm (6 inch) squares.

Gently fry the onion, carrot and potato in the oil for about 5 minutes or until it starts to soften, then add the mushrooms, sauces and seasoning.

Cook until mushrooms and other veggies are tender and let cool.

Divide the filling between the pastry squares on the diagonal. Cover with the other side of the pastry square and press the edges to seal (decorate with a fork if you like it pretty). (If you have time, now is the time to cool them in the fridge for an hour or so and then re seal them).

Set puffs onto non stick baking trays (heh, turns out mine doesn't fit in my new oven so I used pizza trays, which worked by the way!) and brush with a little of the non dairy milk.

Bake at 200C for 20 minutes or so until well browned and puffy. Then eat and enjoy.

With them we had Potato Dauphinois. This is kind of greasy but it's really yummy (like I said, only for special!). Sorry to all the vegans who frequent here, this is pretty far from being vegan (needed to feed the whole family)
Potatoes Dauphinois

1 kg Potatoes, sliced thinly (if you have a mandolin slicer, use it! Mine were so delicate and soft)
1 Onion, finely sliced (again on the mandolin if you have one)
2 cloves Garlic, crushed
4 Tbsp Margarine or Butter
125g Cheddar or Vintage Cheese, grated
Nutmeg, ground
Salt and Pepper
300ml thin fresh Cream
300ml Milk

Preheat oven to 180C.

Grease a casserole or baking dish lightly with oil spray and layer the potatoes with the onion.

Melt the butter gently in the microwave and stir through the garlic. Sprinkle this mixture on between potato layers also.

Once finished layering all the potato, sprinkle with the majority of the cheese, sprinkle over a pinch of nutmeg and season.

Heat the cream and milk either in the microwave or over the stovetop until hot (but don't boil it). Pour this mixture over the potatoes, ensuring it goes right to the bottom of the dish.

Sprinkle with the remaining cheese and bake for approximately 1 hour or until the potatoes are tender and the cheese is melted and browned.

2007-12-27T16:45:00.000+11:00

Chocolatey Chocolate Choc Chip Cookies

1 3/4 cups Plain Flour
1/4 cup Cocoa Powder (unsweetened)
3/4 tsp Baking Powder
1/2 tsp Baking Soda
1/4 tsp Salt
112g unsalted Margarine, cut into pieces
1 cup tightly packed Dark Brown Sugar (I used 3/4 Dark Molasses Sugar and 1/4 plain brown sugar)
1/2 tsp Chocolate Extract
1/2 tsp Vanilla Extract
1/2 cup semi-sweet Chocolate Chips

Heat oven to 150ºC.

In a sifter, combine flour, cocoa, baking soda, baking powder and salt then sift into a large bowl.

Place the butter and brown sugar in a bowl and mix with an electric mixer on medium for 4 minutes, until soft (I used a hand held electric mixer). Use a rubber spatula to scrape down the sides of the bowl.

Add the chocolate and vanilla extracts. Beat on medium for 1 minute until combined. Scrape down the bowl again then operate the mixer on low while gradually adding the sifted dry ingredients until incorporated, about 1 minute.

Add the chocolate chips and stir or mix with hands until combined. Using 2 heaping tablespoons of dough for each cookie, roll and gently flatten each cookie and place onto nonstick baking sheets. Bake for 8-10 minutes for soft chewy cookies or 15-20 for crunchy.

Cool on tray for 5 minutes then use a spatula to move and cool completely on a wire rack.

Aussie Melting Moments

150g Margarine, at room temperature
48g Icing Sugar or Mixture (I used sugar but added 1 Tbsp Cornflour)
1/2-1 tsp Vanilla Extract (I used Vanilla Bean Paste which has the seeds and is why you can see them)
1 3/4 cups plain Flour
1/3 cup Cornflour (Cornstarch)
Icing Sugar for dusting

Filling
36g Margarine
1/2 cup Icing Sugar
1 Tbsp Cocoa

Preheat oven to 160C and line 2 baking trays with baking paper.

Beat the margarine with the icing sugar/icing mixture with an electric beater until pale and creamy.

Sift together the flour and cornflour and add to the margarine mixture.

Mix together gently with a wooden spoon and then with your hands.

Use lightly floured hands to roll mixture into walnut sized balls, place on trays 5cm apart and flatten with a fork (I used my hands so they were smooth) to about 1cm thick.

Bake for approximately 15 minutes, swapping trays in oven half way through, until cooked through.

Cool on the trays.

Filling: Place all ingredients in a small bowl (not too small though) and smoosh with the back of a spoon until well mixed together.

Sandwich cooled biscuits together with the filling and then dust lightly with icing sugar.

You can vary the filling by adding one of the following:
Grated rind of one orange (with or without the cocoa)
Grated rind of one lemon (probably without the cocoa)
1 Tbsp of Passion Fruit Pulp

As an added note, I made the dough and refrigerated it for a day. I don't recommend doing this, it made the dough kind of hard to work with and the end result wasn't as light and crumbly as it should have been.

More stuff to come later tonight hopefully! (and you should see what my Grandma got me for Christmas!!!

A Very Yummy Christmas...

2007-12-25T16:12:00.000+11:00

Well, Christmas Day has been and is well on the way to gone. I won't bore you all with the details, suffice to say, Christmas lunch turned out as well as I'd hoped (and I was proud of myself for actually being able to do it, being this my first Chrissy as the cook and also the amount of food I ended up preparing for us all! I had big doubts there for a while that it would come together). The only real glitch was that I prepared a bunch of summer dishes and it ended up being a pretty cold 18 C (although I disagree with the local barometer and say it's a whole lot colder, I've had a big fleecy jumper on all day!).

Sadly sitting down to a cold meal doesn't seem so great when it's cold. But anyway, it was all delicious in the end.

First up was VwaV Mango Summer Rolls, I served these up with Mango Chutney rather than the sauce in the book:
Then there was Veganomicon Quinoa Salad with Black Beans and Mango (not sure on the exact name, too lazy to get up and check right now). This salad is amazing! Even Mr Un-Veg mumbled "mmmm mmm mmmm" while elbowing me and giving me the thumbs up (which means a massive rave about it from him):

Then there was Strawberry Salad with Speck and Halloumi (minus the speck of course for me) from Jamie at Home (which you can see bits of in the bottom photo, I put it all together beautifully on my plate, turned on the camera, sat down and forgot to take the photo! Doh! First time I've ever forgotten a photo! I'm sure it won't be the last, oh well.)

And for dessert, or really for the rest of the day as munchables were Chocolatey Chocolate Choc Chip Cookies (which were supposed to be Lump of Coal Cookies but I didn't have black cocoa powder and I don't actually think you can get it here plus some add ins and some minus's): Recipe coming tomorrow), they turned out pretty well considering I basically winged them!
Lastly, Aussie Melting Moments. These are traditionally made with butter but I of course made them with margarine. The smaller one's were perfect, some of the bigger one's could have used a few more minutes in the oven. Yummy crumbly butter bikkies filled with chocolate cream filling: (recipe coming tomorrow):
Here it all is sitting on the table waiting for us to tuck in.

I apologize for the single meat dish in the background!! I live with carnivores!!!

(I won't go on about what absolute garbage I ate for dinner tonight!)

Dunno if there's room for Christmas Pudding and Custard!

Happy Christmas everyone! See you all soon with recipes (I'll try and add them here tomorrow)!

Happy Christmas.

2007-12-24T09:14:00.000+11:00

Just popping in to say a very big

Happy Christmas to you all!!

Love from Charlotte
and Toby (who would not behave hisself)
and the rest of the Veg/UnVeg Family :D

(I may or may not see you on Christmas Day tomorrow so this is in case I don't!)

Sauteed Seitan, Messy Rice and a Christmas Sneaky Peek.

2007-12-22T19:09:00.000+11:00

Well, it's the first day of the school holidays (a whole 6 weeks of them) and all I can say is "BRING BACK SCHOOOOOOOOOOL!!!!!" Ugh, my 3 rugrats have spent the entire day fighting, arguing, getting on each others nerves (and mine!) and whatever else they can do to drive me crazy :P I'm over the holidays already!

I have pretty much spent all of today in the kitchen. I went to get the Christmas groceries this morning and I do not want to brave the mall again until well and truly after the big day and I had dinner planned. Problem was I thought I had seitan in the freezer and I didn't and because I refused to go back to the shop I had to make some. Not really what you want to be doing when you're prepping a thousand other things, but anyway, thank goodness for baked seitan! So much easier!!!

Dinner tonight was another Veganomicon special. Sauteed Seitan with Mushrooms and Spinach and I served it with Messy Rice (also V'Con). It was great, except I used Bragg's in mine and I've never used it before and my it was salty! Next time I use it I won't bother to add salt to the recipe!! But otherwise, while it isn't a big favourite, I did enjoy it.
Okay, I promised a sneaky peek of Christmas. Here's the first yummy (had to just give you a snippet of this one, I took one of the whole log and it looked unbearably disgusting, if you can imagine a photo of a big, greasy brown log with bits in it then you're on the right track to just how bad that photo was!
The next yummy thank goodness had not much possibility of looking disgusting (bear in mind, these aren't cooked). Those little black flecks (that are almost invisible on blogger) are vanilla bean seeds, I hope these taste as good as they're supposed to!
And given that it's going to be hot, here's some freshness (I wish you could post side by side pictures! But I can't make it work.):

I de-stemmed, rinsed and bagged 5 bunches of herbs today. You know how everyone has a pet peeve? Something to do with cooking or the kitchen that they absolutely loathe doing? Well mine is herbs. I adore fresh herbs but the preparation for them...well I can leave it or leave it!

While I was busy getting all that organized (let me tell you I am not really looking forward to Christmas day. I'm seriously doubting my ability to pull off all I have planned!), Mr Tobes perused from the safety of the bench atop Veganomicon:
He really loves this book. Once he's done checking out what's cooking he uses it for a snooze:
And just cause I love them, a close up of kitty paws, yes, his feet really are that big! His paws are like lions feet:

Snobby Joes and Gigantic Passionfruit.

2007-12-21T15:17:00.000+11:00

Would you believe, that on the hottest day of the entire season, I decide to make a winter time comfort meal? Oh well....sometimes you get that. I had to eat it under the air conditioner though :P

V'Cons Snobby Joes are amazing! I've never had "real" sloppy joes before (they must be an American thing) but trust me, there's no way they're better than these! I had to make myself stop eating them so I didn't get a belly ache from too many lentils!

Oh and if you don't have the book yet, you can taste test them here.

We went to the fruit and veg market today and I found these massive passionfruit. I photographed it next to a teaspoon for perspective because I knew they'd just look normal. Maybe I've been living under a rock my whole life but I have never seen passionfruit this huge!
Today in the garden K found a baby praying mantis (or maybe it was a baby stick insect, anyone know how to tell? I could google it but I'm too lazy tonight). SOOO cute (well for an insect anyway!):
Anyway, I have a killer Christmas line up (well me and Mr Un-Veg think so anyway!). Not sure if I'll be doing a lot of interesting cooking until then given that he's away until christmas eve (late, sigh). If I don't see you before then you'll know it was all reruns :P

Bentil Bol and other stuff...

2007-12-19T19:46:00.000+11:00

Helloo fellow bloggers. I am in the process of organizing some yumminess, it's just that every day I go to make them and then I get busy and it doesn't happen. But there's yummies coming, I promise! Amongst emergency dental appointments and Christmas craziness I've whipped up a couple of things. Just not had time to blog them, or they're not quite right or I just plain don't like them!

The other afternoon we decided, despite the weather being ordinary, to head out to the beach for a quick bit of afternoon fun. The rugrats found this in the front yard. I've never seen anything like it and have no idea what it is but it's one of those so ugly yet so beautiful and interesting bugs that I had to get photo's to share!
These teeny photo's seriously don't do him/her justice. They look SO much more amazing full sized!

One afternoon I decided to try my hand at nutnog. Now never having drunk eggnog before (ick! can't think of anything worse), I have no idea what kind of texture I was aiming for. Anyway, this was basically unstrained almond milk with spices like cinnamon. It was kind of floury from the unstrained nut milk. I liked the spices though, I might try again one day with cashew nut milk and strain it this time! I guess I was kind of expecting a thick custardy consistency too but it was more like plain nut milk with flavour:
One of our dinners was based around Lemon Scented Barley. Basically you slice a lemon, pop it in a big pot of water, bring to the boil, add a cup of Pearl Barley and boil for 30-45 minutes or until the barley is tender. Juice a lemon and mix juice with 2 Tbsp of chopped parsley. Drain the barley once done and toss with juice mixture. I served it up with halloumi and sesame asparagus spears. Turns out I don't like barley all that much. It has kind of a gooey, squeaky weird kind of texture which Mr Un-Veg informed me is normal for barley (icky!). The flavours were good and I'll probably try them with another grain another time.
Dinner the other night was something I'd been meaning to make for a long time but just never got around to it. Then of course I couldn't leave it alone. The original recipe is for Bulgur Bolognase which sounded amazingly yummy but I cheated and bought a jar of sauce. To said tomato sauce I added about 300g of sliced mushrooms, 1 grated carrot, 2 cloves of garlic, 1 minced onion, 1/2 tsp Oregano, 1/2 tsp Majoram, 1/4 tsp parsley flakes, about 1/6 of a cup of Bourghul (Bulgur Wheat or Cracked Wheat) and about half a cup of cooked brown lentils. A big stir, a bit of a simmer, some wholemeal spaghetti and yum!
2 nights ago I got enthusiastic and decided to whip up some Peanut Butter Mousse. Given that I can't eat tofu it had to be a dairy version (unless anyone has any other ideas for me?). This one was made with cream, cream cheese, peanut butter and a few other things. I'm honestly not a big fan. I think the cream cheese gives it a weird texture and since it's all still sitting prettily in the fridge, I don't think anyone else was much of a fan either! It looked pretty though:

Tonight I had some leftover Puttanesca Sauce with fettuccine. The rugrats ate all the garlic bread on me with their dinner (so much for a sore tooth Miss K!) so I whipped up some of Katies Spoon Corn Bread from DEOTS 2. This was seriously great cornbread. I fiddled with it a bit (of course!) because I can't have vegan sour cream or yoghurt and didn't have any dairy versions and also because I don't like sweet corn bread so I left the sweet bit out of it. It still came out dense and moist, almost like a big warm scone! Definitely my favourite corn bread I've tried and one that's gonna stick around for a long while to come (that means forever :P):
Before I go. I went in to the lounge room the other day. You see, my kitties, Charlotte and Toby..they seriously hate on each other most of the time. Turns out this is what is going on when I turn my back:Look closely! They're holding hands!!

Pet Stores..

2007-12-13T08:50:00.001+11:00

I have no idea if pet stores in Australia do the same but I'd say it's likely. I know most of us know that pet stores use puppy mills to get their stock from their shop and the cruelty behind it all however for anyone who has stumbled across here by accident, this is why you should always rescue a puppy or kitty (or whatever!) from a local shelter and give an animal who is already alive a new life. This just breaks my heart. This comes from The Humane Society Stop Puppy Mills website:

Hee hee, updating cause I couldn't help myself after finding this on the PPK: click here

A gripe and some muffins of my own :P

2007-12-12T18:04:00.000+11:00

Being a huge Jamie Oliver fan, I was super excited the other week to learn that the book was in my local library. I'm all for buying books that I'm going to use but I wanted to try before I buy-ed with this one given that it's predominantly an omni book. There's a number of recipes I'm interested in but what got me was a single picture that I came to.

There's a topic on Lamb (yes, cooking it) and it talks about slaughter and which "cuts of meat" are the best ones' and what to do with them blah blah. Then it shows all these recipes and meals with full page photo's of them all (well...it IS an omni book). Okay I can over look that.

Picture this, you're an omni, yes you like to eat lamb, you make the recipes and then you get to the end of the lamb section and you come across this:
Now my parents are die hard omni's. Nothing is EVER going to sway them from thinking that meat is good for them, but even they were disgusted and a little upset at the sight of this picture in the middle of a cooking book. What?!?!!

There was another picture in there that wasn't pleasant also but I won't subject you all to that. I'm preaching to the converted for the most part I imagine.

After that I leave you with living cuteness that is destined for happy old age:
This afternoon I was once again hanging about (raining) and trying to figure out what to do and hankering for some muffins so I decided to have a look at what was on the shelf in the pantry and see what I could come up with.

This is pretty much the first time I've ever tried to come up with something of my own. I admit I borrowed from basic vegan muffin recipes and I borrowed the idea of orange and cranberry from the bread I made the other day but otherwise.... this is what I came up with. They got the Un-Veg "mmmmmmm hmmmm goooooood" with a mouth choc full of muffin which means they must be okay :P
Chocolate Kissed Orange Cranberry Muffins
1/2 cup dried Cranberries
2 cups Plain Flour
3/4 cup granulated Sugar (I plan to fiddle, I think it would be okay with 1/2 a cup)
2 tsp Baking Powder
1 tsp Bicarb Soda (Baking Soda)
1/4 tsp Salt
2 Tbsp Oil (anything light flavoured, I use rice bran but you could use grapeseed, canola, etc) 1/4 cup + 2 Tbsp unsweetened Apple Puree
1 Orange
1 tsp Vanilla Extract Water
Non Dairy Choc Chips

Preheat oven to 180C.

Put the cranberries into a bowl and cover with hot water. Let stand a couple of minutes until they soften then drain well and chop roughly.

Sift flour, sugar, baking powder, baking soda and salt into a medium bowl.

Finely zest the orange and then juice it and pour juice into a measuring cup. Make up to 380ml with water then add the oil, applesauce (puree), zest and vanilla and mix with a fork.

Add wet ingredients to dry ingredients and stir until just mixed. Add the cranberries and pour into a lightly oiled muffin tin. Top each with 1-3 choc chips and bake for 18-20 minutes or until centres are firm to the touch and a toothpick comes out clean.

And yeah, I know what the chocolate tops look like. No nipple jokes please :P. Just remember...it is food porn that you want!
Dinner tonight was a rerun again but honestly...how could you not want to eat the VwaV Sweet Potato Crepes with Tamarind Coconut Sauce all the time? I made these a number of times when I first got the book and then they kind of slipped my mind. How on earth did I let that happen?!?!

Low Fat Brownie Bites, Jelly Fruit Bowls and Mexican Millet:

2007-12-10T19:41:00.000+11:00

Mr Un-Veg is due home (late late late) tonight sometime. I'm always a little bit bored on the day he's due home because you're kind of just waiting for someone to wake up and start driving already :P

Anyway, I'd seen on Isa's blog the other day her Low Fat Brownie Bites. I made them as the recipe states but I used white flour because for who knows what reason, whole wheat pastry flour does not exist in Australia (or if someone knows that it does, please tell me where to get it from!). I also subbed the coffee for decaf because I only have one cup of "real" coffee a day generally. They came out really dense and yummy and not too sweet (I guess cause some of the sweet is fruit). The kids LOVE them and the best bit is I have to limit myself to one a day because a lot of prunes are NOT my friend!
Ahem....after that I wandered around the kitchen for a bit looking in fridges and cupboards (as you do when you're a bored foodie) and found a tin of fruit and a packet of jelly crystals that I got from the Asian supermarket before we left. They're vegan one's made from carrageenan (sp?) and something else. I'm not a huge fan of agar and the kids won't eat it, it sets kind of hard. This stuff produces a much softer wobbly kind of jelly and at least one of my girls loves the stuff (the other two don't like fruit in their jelly).

So I made up the right amount of lime cordial (yeah unhealthy I know), mixed it with the jelly crystals, heated it up and poured it over the fruit. J danced around the kitchen in happiness (awww gotta love it when you make them happy!):
Dinner tonight I wanted a grain and had been wanting to try V'Cons Mexican Millet for a while cause it sounded yummy. I subbed half a teaspoon of Paprika because of my don't eat chillies thing and I ended up having to add almost a whole cup more of water to it (but I seem to have that problem whenever I cook by absorption) and it was a little much so the end result was a little wetter than it should have been I think. But it wasn't gluggy, it gave it a kind of creamy consistency.

Oh and I used my Millet Couscous. Anyone remember my excitement about it? Well it turns out after an experiment I did with a teaspoon of the couscous and a tablespoon of boiling water that it's actually just hulled millet, wrongly labelled as couscous, so I was very sad because I already had a HEEEUUUGGGE bag of millet in the cupboard. But this used up some of it rather nicely.

I definitely recommend serving it with the fresh tomato on top. I had it with the Split Pea Burger Patties I've blogged about before, which went perfectly because they both have cumin and I cut up half an avocado and some steamed baby corn (I've noticed the vegan community seems to hate on baby corn, why is that? I adore it!):

2007-12-08T19:46:00.000+11:00

Sorry for the lack of updates once again! I've actually written about 3 posts but when it came to dinner it wasn't that exciting or it was a rerun or it was a complete disaster! Some of the things I've made this week included Lolo's Cranberry Apple Couscous (well technically it was pumpkin stuffing but it's awesome on it's own) from my testing for Vegan Yum Yum
And some of the Jalapeno Popper Filling as a Cheesy Dip (mmm this is amazing!) also from Vegan Yum Yum testing:
I made the Garlic Saffron Rice from Veganomicon (God I love this book! Every time I make something from it I love it a little bit more). And yes, that's MORE Tamarind Lentils you can see in the background :P I have a terrible addiction to these...so much so that I usually give myself a tummy ache from eating too many, I had to freeze single portions of it so I wouldn't!
I made some Chickpea Cutlets (also from Veganomicon) but I made them with Black Beans instead of chickpeas. I also used different spices. They were like a combination of the South Western Black Bean Burgers I posted on here ages ago and V'Con's Black Bean Burgers (I think of the same name) and the cutlets. They were okay, I think I baked them a teeny bit long though! I made the sweet spiced potato (again from V'Con). This stuff was great and got the Un-Veg seal of approval. It was kind of like having mashed Pumpkin Muffins (you know, the awesome one's from VwaV?):P. It went with the black bean thingumy:
I decided one night to make Potato, Leek and Celeraic Hotpot. We've had Celeraic at the local supermarket since I got here a month ago. Of course the day I decided to make this I got there and there was none and hasn't been since so a quick change of plans and I made a potato and leek pie. It was good comfort food but nothing to really rave about. Turns out I might have the most awesome oven ever but I have the crummiest griller ever :(
Then I decided to make a dish I hadn't made before called Chinese Bake with Watercress Sauce. In theory it sounded great. It was basically a bed of cottage cheese, covered by the steamed stems of chinese greens and a sauce made from garlic, the cooked leaves of the chinese greens and a bunch of cooked watercress and topped with some parmesan. It looked great coming out of the oven and it smelled awesome too. Only problem was I dished it up and I couldn't find any of the cottage cheese, even though I'd used double the amount. It looks good right?
I sat down to dinner with the kids and started eating my rice and they all tasted their dinner looking horrified and crying "eeeewwww" and me being the cook got all offended so stuck a big fork full in my mouth and "EEEEEWWWWW"!!! I don't know what it was, maybe the watercress, I'd never eaten it before but the whole thing was just super bitter and just plain gross. So we filled up on the rice and salad I'd served with it. Again though, no real blog post. The following night I stuck with the infallible. My low fat version of the New Farm Mac and Cheese (which doesn't involve tofu).

Anyway, tonight, on what is probably one of the hottest nights we've had so far this season I decided that I was again craving Isa's Quinoa Puttanesca (yeah, I know I just blogged this) but I tried a variation on it. I happened to come across Quinoa Balls (or patties) from Vanescipies and they sounded great so I used her recipe for those only I made mine quite plain without all the herbs. If I have a powerful sauce, I like whatever is with it to be simple, and I stuck with the Post Punk Kitchen blog sauce. As before the sauce was awesome! And the quinoa balls were perfect! They didn't stick at all (although I admit I REALLY coated the pan in non stick spray and they gave it a lovely different kind of texture. The leek went really well with the sauce too! I halved the recipe for the quinoa balls and still have enough for another meal and made the whole amount of sauce (so I can freeze it and use it on anything and everything). Lip smackingly yummy!
So like I said, not a whole heap to post really but just wanted to say I'm still here...I've just had too many meals go wrong (or kind of wrong or they're just plain boring!).

I think it's too close to Christmas. Goodness knows what I'm going to cook for my first veggie Christmas. Mum usually cooks but they're not coming this year and it's usually chicken and ham anyway and Christmas Day is always HOT HOT HOT! Idea's anyone?

Oh well, at least I've mostly finished my shopping :P

On the good side, my parents were visiting for the last couple of days and they live in the cherry capital of Australia and with them they brought a kilo of delicious cherries. Mmmmm cherry coloured deilciousness!:
PS, anyone got any natural remedies for a flea problem? I'm so itchy!!

A little bit of this and a little bit of that and shake your bum, dum dum dum dum...

2007-12-02T17:04:00.000+11:00

Sorry, got a bit carried away with the title and mixed it up with the chicken dance song! Today really was a good mixture of stuff. Speaking of carried away, I also got carried away with the photo-ing today so you'll have to put up with a pic heavy post!

First I went out the back this morning and who should I find sunning themselves on Mr Un-Veg's weights bench but the Roon! Look at that dangling leg, I couldn't resist a photo!!

At Woolies today I found a new find (probably not a good one as far as the waistline is concerned but as far as my taste buds are....well that's a whole other story!). Vegan (yes, you read that right) soy free (almost) chocolate spread! Most (most) people who are allergic or intolerant to soy can handle small amounts in emulsifiers and soy oil...there are a few who can't and this....other than a soy based emulsifier, is soy free and delicious! I don't generally buy woolies own brand stuff but this one I was willing to ignore that rule. Mmmm good:
This afternoon and inspired by Elizabeth (Veggiegirl) and her cake post yesterday, I decided to do a bit of baking. So out came the Veganomicon and I found a recipe for Cranberry Orange-Nut Bread that sounded fabulous. A quick dash down the shops for some oranges and all was good, well except for the fact that I didn't have fresh cranberries (can you even get them in Australia? I've never seen them) so I re-hydrated some dried ones'. I also used a little bit less sugar (although not a whole lot less, I used about 3/4 of what it asked for) and baked it for only slightly longer than half the recommended time.

I also had some mini loaf tins I have been dying to use (that I technically bought so I could make some chickpea cutlet "loaffins" as they're called over at the PPK) so I made a half recipe (cause I know odds are my kids won't eat a lot of this and I do NOT need an excuse to eat an entire loaf of cake like bread!).
This shot shows you in comparison to my hand for added loaf adorableness (excuse the lack of a thumbnail, I ripped it on something the other night):
And the inside money shot:
What came out of my oven smells, looks and tastes absolutely heavenly and the rugrats whom I thought wouldn't eat it clamoured around jumping up and down yelling for slices of it! It's just perfect (not that I thought it wouldn't be!)

This afternoon while baking Mr Toby decided he needed to do a bit of reading of Veganomicon.
He just HAD to show me his favourite recipe :P
Last but not least was dinner. As an omni I loved this recipe, and I'm embarrassed to say that one night while cooking the original chicken version for hubby my vegetarianism was wavering a LOT (for those of you who follow, you knew I went back to eating fish. I last one horrible meal and it killed me so other than that hiccup I've remained veggie).

Anyway today I was making it for Mr Un-Veg again and given that I had some DEOTS chicken seitan left I decided to give it a try with that. Oh I am SO glad I can officially have my cake (well my chicken burger) and eat it too! YUM!! (Obviously my coriander/lime obsession was with me before vegetarianism was!)

Coriander and Lime "Chicken Burgers"
Serves 4

4 "Chicken" Seitan Fillets/thick slices/cutlets
1/2 cup Lime Juice
2 Tbsp Peanut Oil
2 Tbsp fresh Coriander (Cilantro)
2 cloves Garlic, crushed
4 Hamburger Rolls, toasted
2 Green Onions (Shallots/Scallions), finely sliced
1/2 cup Alfalfa Sprouts
1/2 punnet Cherry Tomatoes

Chilli Mayonnaise
1/2 cup Mayonnaise (Veganaise, what ever you like to use/call it)
1 Tbsp Sweet Chilli Sauce

Place the juice, oil, coriander and garlic into a bowl and mix. Toss seitan in mixture, cover and refrigerate for as long as possible (I managed 4 hours but 20 minutes is enough if you're pressed for time).

Prepare chilli mayo by mixing ingredients in a bowl.

Cook seitan in a non stick frying pan with marinade until all marinade has evaporated and seitan is heated through (it's up to you if you want to make it crispy but I didn't).

Serve on the toasted buns with alfalfa, tomatoes, chilli mayo and shallots.

Blog Readability, Pies and Roasted Corn Guacamole.

2007-11-30T18:35:00.000+11:00

The Veg B*#@h (:P) blog is one of my favourites (although for some reason I haven't added it to my blog roll yet but I will get to that in a second). The other day she had a blog readability test on her blog so I decided to give it a whirl. Not sure it's quite the level of "intelligence" I was aiming for and I've no idea how it's worked out but it's a bit of fun anyway. Apparently you are all a bunch of genius's (yeah, I know that's misspelled!)....not that I ever doubted that vegetarians and vegans were/are smarter than the average person :P:

Last night all I really felt like was a burger pattie so I whipped up some of the Meowee burgers I've blogged about before but threw in 1/4 cup of rice crumbs before chilling it. It gave it kind of a weird texture to work with when cold but they firmed up pretty well and were great once cooked so I'll probably stick with this variation for a while (until I get all super experimental again-kidding!). It was pretty hot so I decided to give the Roasted Corn Guacamole I found over at Vegan Dad's blog the other day a whirl. It was pretty yummy. I used canned corn instead of frozen but otherwise. The corn kind of went a little chewy which I wasn't real fond of so I'm not sure I'll roast my corn next time but it could be my cast iron pan or it could just be that I used tinned corn (or it could just be that maybe I can't cook!) The taste was great though, especially when combined with the burger pattie and a lebanese bread. It could have used more avocado but that's because I picked some dodgy one's that had these weird black fibrous flecks through them when I opened them (they felt fine, I usually pick avocado's pretty well but all 3 of them were like it!) Mmmmm:
I've been kind of sick lately so I couldn't be bothered to cook tonight (plus it's Friday! who ever feels like cooking on Friday night?) so I got out one of my pies I blogged about the other day.
I picked the Ricotta and Spinach one as much as I wanted the Curried Lentil one I wasn't sure my stoopid stomach was up to lentils at the moment. I dished it up with some DEOTS mashed potatoes (I am LOVING these!) and steamed broccoli. It was a little runnier than I like a pie to be but the pastry was awesome and the taste was really yummy. Definitely something I'd keep in the freezer for can't be bothered nights and/or pie cravings. Can't wait to try the lentil one!

Isa's Quinoa Puttanesca..

2007-11-28T19:42:00.000+11:00

Isa always cooks amazing food but this one really made me want to try it. I LOVE Pasta Puttanesca (no rude comments please!) and also love quinoa so it's a match made in heaven, right?

You bet! Nothing more to say really except if you haven't made this yet, make it! Unless you don't like strong flavoured sauces in which case maybe not so much for you. Mine wasn't as pretty as the one on the PPK blog but meh, it tasted superb and that's what matters isn't it?

Recipe here.

(Yes, short post today :P)

Panko Crusted Dijon "Chicken", Mash and Gravy and Cooking Style....

2007-11-27T17:55:00.000+11:00

While I was preparing stuff for dinner tonight (at 4pm!) I realized that as chaotic as I am in general, I am a very methodical cook, which is probably why I don't cook a LOT off the cuff.

I had my potatoes all peeled, diced and waiting to boil by 5pm, the spices for my gravy mixed together so I could throw them all in in one hit, the mixture for the mashed potatoes all ready to go in the fridge, the cutlets all crusted and ready to cook and my utensils lined up in a row in order of which I would need them, first to last (pedantic? obsessive? perfectionist?). I then put back all the containers etc that I was finished with in order to minimize the mess I would have to clean up after dinner.

Then all that being said it depends on what I cook. It's no less methodic, but when I make cookies for example or muffins or cupcakes I don't get everything out ready to go. I'll read the destructions and see flour so I'll go get the flour, measure it and put it away again, then I'll read baking powder, go get it, measure it and put it away and that way I'm not making a big mess and once I'm done all I have to wash is the bowls, utensils and tins.

Not that this probably interests most of you but it got me wondering, how do YOU cook? Do you have it all out of the pantry, lined up ready to go, anything that can be mixed together before hand mixed and ready to pop in or are you a somewhat more chaotic cook (for lack of a better word), grabbing stuff as you need it and leaving mess behind in your wake? I'd love to hear about your style of cooking, so leave me a comment and tell me! You know the story about the satisfied kitty cat right?

Okay, once again enough rambling! (No wonder I called this blog Vegetation Ramblings! I can't shut up it would seem :P)

Onto the food! I know I've blogged similar stuff before but for me this was a real comfort food meal. I mentioned the other day that I had cooked some of Katie's Chick'n Seitan from my Don't Eat Off the Sidewalk 'zine but didn't know what I was doing with it? Well I decided. I found some Panko at that Asian/Indian store I found the other day and decided after the rave reviews I've read that I'd give it a go. It was amazing! I LOVE this stuff and like I also said before, I'm not really a seitan fan. This one is a keeper for me as far as Chicken flavoured seitan goes!
If you want to make them at home it's easy! And for those of you with omni Mr's or Mrs's it goes perfectly with the (ick!) real thing too! It's even kid friendly and if they don't like mustard just water the initial "egg" mixture down with more rice milk:

Panko Crusted Dijon "Chicken" Schnitzel
2 Tbsp Egg Replacer (check the box, but you want to make it up according to destructions)
4 Tbsp Rice, Cashew or Soy Milk (I guess you could use water too, again use equivalent liquid according to packet destructions)
1 Tbsp Dijon Mustard
1/2 cup Panko breadcrumbs
1/4 cup Plain Flour (All Purpose Flour)
3-4 cutlets of Chicken Style Seitan

Mix the egg replacer, rice milk and mustard in a medium sized bowl, let sit for a couple of minutes, it will get all nice and thick.

Put plain flour on a plate and panko on another.

Dip cutlets into the flour, then into the Dijon "egg" mixture and then coat with the Panko. Spray them with a fine light mist of water and fry lightly in a non stick pan with a little oil until brown and crispy.

With it I served up Katies special mashed potatoes and gravy and some steamed broccoli. Mmmmmm perfect! Once again you HAVE to buy this zine! SO much yumminess!!

And lastly just a peek at what Mr Un-Veg requested today. A batch of Isa's VwaV choc chip cookies. These one's are a family favourite for sure!