I've finally figured out how to roast potatoes properly.

And the results are pretty damn delicious :)

Cut potatoes relatively small. Preheat oven to 210 degrees. Mix potatoes with about 1 tbsp of oil. Put in oven. Cook for about 45 minutes. Mmmm.

I had to perform that difficult procedure to make the 'White Beans and Lemon Potatoes with Olives and Tomatoes' from Vegan on the Cheap (pg 165). However, I change every recipe I cook from. I used about 3x as many olives, extra potatoes (because there were only a few left in the bag and the rest were squishy), kidney beans instead of white beans (and an extra cup at that), like 8 cloves of garlic left whole instead of 3 crushed, and fresh basil added at the end instead of parsley. Served it on twisty tricolour pasta. It was so delicious. Simplicity at it's best. Not many flavours compliment each other as well as olives and well, anything really.

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This was part of the meal plan I wrote for this week. Our budget is a little tight because of moving costs, and me not being able to work for a few days due to flooding (yay rain!) and I find a concrete plan makes things a lot easier to handle. And since I have a pantry, and the shops are a little further away than the top of our driveway, I can buy the whole weeks groceries at once. It helps that our local fruit shop is the cheapest fruit shop I've ever been to. And the produce lasts!

I'll be blogging a little more later about various other things we have been cooking. My camera cord was in a box somewhere so I have quite the backlog of pictures to go through :)

Caprese bites/appetisers

Very simple: a thin sliver of Teese Mozzarella (I buy mine at the Green Edge, when I buy it. It costs about $11 for 10 ounces, which is very expensive. But sometimes I want it.) , a slice of fresh tomato (mine are tiny), a sprinkle of black pepper and a fresh basil leaf. Eat!

So simple and so yummy. It needs a rice craker or piece of toaste underneath it, but I was lazy and just wanted a little snack.

Todays harvest: teeny yellow capsicum, even teenier tomato (supposed to be a regular sized one not cherry!) and a tiny strawberry.

The capsicum had gotten eaten a little bit. The tomato was divine (and the last one off all my tomato plants - I only ended up with about 6 tomatoes from 5 plants haha), and the strawberry was so sweet and delicious. I wish my plant would grow more than 1 every so often!

Hangover food

Drank waaaayy too much last night? Never fear, Macca's deep fried hash browns need not be an option any longer.

My absolute favourite thing to eat when I've drank too much is pasta. Nothing else quite cuts it in the carb department. Plain tomato pasta sauce with heaps of chilli powder is pretty good, but the utimate is just chilli, garlic, olive oil and basil. B-vitamins are important in recovering from a hangover, so adding a spoonful of nutritional yeast or marmite to this would have been a good idea.

Still feel disgusting by dinner and about ready to crawl under the bed and die?

Noodle soup! I use any kind of noodles I happen to feel like/have, 'chicken' stock powder (I use Massel), garlic, chilli, and a green vegetable. This time I used a brocolli, but beans are good, zucchini, spinach, whatever. Brocolli is best though. Sometimes I put tofu in but it was too hard to open the packet. Heaps of garlic is good and can top up your immune system which the alcohol would have knocked down a bit.

Tasty, easy, healthy and didn't make me want to vomit when I looked at it.

Also always remember, you can prevent a hangover by drinking water while consuming alcohol at a 1:1 ratio (ie. one glass of water for every glass of wine), I also usually try to drink a heap of water before going to bed -or- I mix up some gatorade powder in cold water and chug that. It prevents dehydration which causes the headache and dry mouth of doom. I use gatorade at work so I don't get headaches on hot days. Sometimes water isn't good enough. (I haven't researched it's vegan-ness yet, please don't judge me if it isn't. I'll get to it.)

Or the ultimate hangover-preventative-measure?

Don't drink alcohol!

A minute to relax - 2 recipes!

I had a very busy weekend (I did a painting for a silent auction for donation to the Premier's Flood Relief fund thing and it took AAAGGGES) so it was nice to come home from work this afternoon and actually do something I wanted to do. (Not that I didn't want to do the painting! I just didn't have any chores tonight :)) I tidied my garden! I cut back more lemongrass (the stuff just grows and grows!) some flowers I have that were taking over, and I pulled out my basil because the above little buggers had demolished it all. I rescued enough for a pesto though! I have one bean plant growing (Bob dug up the rest, naughty cat) and I fertilised everything with seaweed and the juice from my bokashi bucket.

On Sunday after we went to the beach we made a light lunch. It may no look very exciting but wow it was delicious. The recipe is adapted from 'Australian Good Food' magazine, Jan/Feb 2011.

Barley and Pea Salad

Makes 4 small serves

2 tbsp olive oil

3 garlic cloves, finely chopped

pinch of dried chilli flakes

Handful of mint, chopped

1 red onion, finely chopped

Rind and juice of a lemon

1 cup pearl barley

200g frozen peas

250g frozen broad beans

Mix all but the last 3 ingredients into a small bowl and set aside.

Cook barley as you usually do (I use 3 cups water per 1 cup barley, bring to boil and simmer for about 30 mins). In last few minutes add peas and broad beans. Wait for it to reboil and cook for a minute.

Drain barley mix and return to pot or put in a bowl. Stir through dressing and serve!

To make this go further you can add tofu or seitan or something.

On Sunday evening I decided to make something for work lunch/snacks. I've been wanting to make my own muesli bars for ages since store bought ones almost always contain honey or milk powder, or are coated in yoghurt or filled with sugar, or hideously expensive *breath*, and of course are all individually wrapped in plastic and cardboard and printed and etc. Useless wastes. So I came across this recipe that I used as a base for my own bars! Let me tell you, they are the best muesli bars I've ever had. I had one with toast for breakfast this morning and I wasn't starving like I usually am by morning tea.

Homemade Muesli Bars

Makes about 14 bars

1 cup rolled barley

1 cup rolled rye

1/4 cup unsweetened dessicated coconut

2 tbsp chia seeds (black or white)

2 tbsp sunflower seeds, lightly bashed in a mortar and pestle

1/4 cup chopped dried cranberries

1/4 cup chopped nuts (I used almonds and brazil nuts)

1 tsp ground cinnamon

1/2 tsp nutmeg

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1/4 cup rice syrup*

1 tbsp molasses**

1/3 cup tahini

1 tsp vanilla extract

Mix all the dry ingredients in a bowl.

In a small saucepan, bring rice syrup and molasses to boil. Take off heat. Stir in tahini and vanilla.

Mix into dry ingredients.

Line a brownie pan with baking paper and turn the mixture into it. Get another piece of baking paper and press it all down flat.

Let cool and cut up into bars! I had mine in the fridge before I cut them up and they crumbled a bit. I'd cut it up at room temperature next time.

*Rice syrup is my new honey. I swear to god, it looks like honey, tastes like honey and is as sweet as honey. It even burned my throat a little when I ate a teaspoon, like honey. I don't think it has the same antibacterial properties as honey though ;) I bought this brand.

** I didn't have any maple syrup as stated in the original recipe so I used what I had on hand. Maple syrup would be better.

I've also been making yoghurt :) Proper yoghurt with probiotics and everything (except the dairy). I'll take a good photo of my next batch. The last one looked like vomit. As yoghurt tends to do. Haha. Another storebought vegan alternative that just doesn't cut it for me (SUGAR!!!). The cheap-cheap easiyo yoghut maker called for me at Woolworths!

Look what you missed out on!

*dribble*

I love making my own pizza. Why don't I do it more often? I think it's because I get it in my head that the dough takes forever, but really it's ready in an hour and a half. That's not that bad. =D

I based it on a recipe from Vegan on the Cheap, and just went a bit nuts with the toppings. I really wanted mushrooms on it, but Brisbane has gone nuts and all the groceries were gone! So I had to make do with what I had. My dad and my sister were supposed to come to tea, but because of all this water dad got evacuated from work near the city and my sister was stuck further south. And damn they missed out.

The dough ingredients are: 2 3/4 cups wholemeal flour, 2 1/4 tsp instant dry yeast, 1 tsp salt and 1 cup warm water. It was a nice thick soft crust when cooked, the way I like it.

The toppings I chose in order from bottom to top:

Tomato paste

Caremelised onions (with maple syrup and balsamic vinegar)

Cooked kidney beans pureed with parsnip and garlic

Sliced tomato

Homemade basil pesto

Before cooking

When I worked at a continental delicatessen, we sold tiny little containers of caremelised onions for about $8.50. Dude. People actually BOUGHT it. It was one of our most popular condiment things. Jeez. I've never made them before but they are so easy.



So pretty

I thinly sliced a huge onion, poured a liberal amount of rice bran oil in my frying pan and cooked them for about 20 minutes on med-low. About half way through I put in a blob of maple syrup and a dash of balsamic. They are so delicious. I might make some tonight to have on a sandwich for work tomorrow.

Anyway, pizza = mmmm. Maybe we should have pizza night more often. 

A pictorial update of my garden - busy busy :)



Sweet basil - is very very healthy and happy right now :)



Soy bean flowers! Aren't they adorable?



Most amazing thing I've ever seen - huge angry wasp diving straight for a huge caterpillar on my soybeans that I didn't even see. It laid it's eggs in it. That is a beneficial.



First beans of a season :) They were tasty.



First purple climbing beans will be ready soon.



Mmmm basil pesto...

I've never made pesto before. When I was vegetarian and just moved out of home, I literally lived off jars of Coles Homebrand basil pesto on angelhair pasta. If I splurged and bought fancy pesto I bought 60c homebrand spaghetti!

I made this specifically for an ingredient in dinner tonight. I got a nice big bunch of basil from the farmers market this morning (I'd have taken a picture but I put it in the coldest part of the fridge, unwrapped - mistake, don't ever do that. A couple of hours later when I got it out of the fridge to make the pesto it had started to turn black and go a bit goopy! Oh well, it's still good...just not photo quality.  I'd have made it out of my own homegrown basil but it really sucks at the moment. One little plant is powering on but the others are giving up on life. No sun! Dammit. I will be moving my pots to a sunny spot soon - hopefully no one moves/steals/knocks them over.

Anyway - to the pesto. I based it off a recipe in Vegan Italiano by Donna Klein. I love this book.

Basic basil pesto

Makes almost 2/3 cup

2 1/2 cups loosely packed fresh basil

3 tbsp almonds

3 garlic cloves, chopped

Few sprigs of parsley (I used curly-leaved, but Italian flat leaved would probably be better)

Few stems of garlic chives (my parsley isn't doing fantastically either)

1/4 cup rice bran oil

Put everything but the oil into a food processor and blend. Add the oil and blend until smooth :)

This was pretty good for a first attempt! I can't afford olive oil - I assume it would be much better to use than rice bran. Next time I might add a cup of spinach to it :) I can afford pine nuts even less. But I thought almonds were nice here :) It's not like you can really taste the nuts anyway.

We decided to have some on spaghetti for lunch. We can't resist pesto when we have it!

I fully intend on growing heaps of basil this summer so I can make big batches of it and freeze it into little individual portions to enjoy through winter :)

3 mushroom pasta

This weekend we decided to go and visit my partner's mother :) This is what she made for dinner:

3 Mushroom Pasta
Serves 2-3

Ingredients:

Olive oil and knob of vegan margarine for frying
100g white button mushrooms, sliced
100g shiitake mushrooms, sliced
100g Oyster mushrooms, sliced
Handful each of basil, curly leaved parsley and Italian parsley (or just one kind of parsley), chopped
1birdseye chilli, finely chopped
1/2 red onion, diced
2 garlic cloves chopped
splash of white wine
Cooked pasta (we used a gluten free corn and rice twist pasta but any kind will do)

Method:

Have all mushrooms, onion, chilli, garlic and herbs sliced and ready. Heat olive oil and knob of margarine in a deep frying pan until margarine is melted. Add in garlic, onion and chilli and fry until onion is translucent.

Add mushrooms and splash of wine and stir. Leave it to cook while you chop up all the herbs finely. When the mushrooms are soft, add in herbs and cook for a few minutes.

Serve on top of cooked pasta!

This was so yummy. Each mushroom had such a distinctive flavour. I've never had shiitake or oyster mushrooms before and I now know I like them.