Mmm fried bread

I bought a 1/4 green cabbage at Woolies the other day because it was only 74c and I didn't quite know what to do with it until I saw this recipe for Spiced Cabbage Flatbreads on Allotment2Kitchen.

I didn't follow the recipe almost at all, but I was certainly inspired by it.

In mine, I put green cabbage, grated purple carrot and their greens, onion, minced garlic and minced ginger. Then I mixed up a peanut sauce out of peanut butter and soy sauce and mixed it through before making up the breads. I also had some tempeh (found it at Coles for about $4 yay!) so I made a sort of tempeh bacon with it (essentially soy sauce, malt vinegar, smoked paprika and cayenne pepper).

The filling was so good by itself without even the peanut sauce! I could eat it all day. The bread was surprisingly easy to make, and they didn't even fall apart like I thought it would. I was thinking next time I'll cook it in my sandwich press instead of frying in a pan - no oil and a time saver! I could do four at once, and cook both sides at the same time. Maybe it'll work! I also used wholemeal plain flour.

I divided the dough into 8, and we ate 3 each for dinner and one was leftover for lunch the next day. These are also pretty good cold! They would be perfect for an appetiser at a dinner party with friends, and could be made smaller again. Go nuts with the filling!

Some interesting produce and souvlaki

Nadine definately knows how to make me happy :) She got me these purple carrots from woolies as a present. Yes I don't get jewellery or chocolates, I get carrots. And it's awesome.

I am actually growing carrots like these (pictured under chicken wire in background) but they aren't ready yet, and only 3 have survived. And I think my ones are orange on the inside, but these from woolies are white on the inside. They also taste like parsnip. In a good way.

I unfortunately decided to use them in some carrot cake cupcakes. Unfortunate because the cupcakes failed miserably. They still taste good so we are going to turn them into a pudding which I'll post later if it's worth it!

The other night I really wanted souvlaki. I am unsure if I've ever actually eaten real souvlaki before but I wanted it anyway. Souvlaki is a greek dish made from lamb chicken or beef, on a skewer. But I obviously didn't  use any of those meats, or put it on a skewer, I made up some seitan instead! I tried to make some seitan using okara but the whole thing fell to pieces in the saucepan, which sucked, so I went back to the recipe for 'simple simmered seitan' in Vegan on the Cheap which of course worked perfectly, since I've made  it a million times.

So, I cooked up the seitan, and sliced half of the recipe into strips (the rest went in the freezer). In a container went half a cup of red wine, a few teaspoons of dried oregano, 1 tsp smoked paprika and some black pepper. I put in the seitan strips, and filled the container with some of the simmering broth to cover the pieces. Shook it up a bit and left it there til dinner, maybe 1 hour?

Meanwhile I made up tzatsiki sauce. 1 cup plain soy yoghurt, 1 small lebanese cucumber diced, zest from half a lemon and juice from half a lemon. There is supposed to be garlic in it but I ran out. Also, I squeezed the cucucmber bits in a paper towel because I didn't want runny tzatsiki. It worked.

I fried up the seitan slices until they were browned and a bit crisp on the outside and ate it all in a multigrain wrap with the tzatsiki and some diced tomato and red onion.

It was so so good.

The only thing is it made the wrap turn into mush (gonna go the skewer route next time) and I wanted to eat more. But if I consumed any more gluten I may have ended up with a stomach ache! There can be too much of a good thing.

Ginormous farmer's market vegetable stew

I spent my Sunday listening to records and fiddling about the house. I love watching the needle touch down.

It was lovely until the neighbour decided to deafen me and everyone in Perth with her doof doof. Oh well, I played records all day yesterday too :)

This is today's farmer's markets haul. From bottom left clockwise: the best bananas in the world, 1/4 jap pumpkin, celery, kale, brazil nuts, bunya nuts (no idea of what to do with these yet!), parsnip, turnips and potato.

Almost all of the above turned into a gigantic stew!

BIG HONKING ROOT VEGETABLE STEW.

Serves 6 (big)

Ingredients:

400g turnips

700g potatoes

200g carrot

600g pumpkin

250g parsnip

250g celery (about 4 stalks), sliced

1 1/2 cups cooked kidney beans

500g brown onion, quartered

5 cloves garlic, roughly chopped

2 tbsp whole peppercorns, crushed or cracked

1 thyme stem left whole

2cm long stem of rosemary left whole

3 bay leaves

2 heaped tsp wholegrain mustard

8 cups weak chicken style stock (or water)

125g short pasta (any shape!)

The method is very simple, as with all stew/soup type dealies.

First, I peeled things that needed peeling (I peel parsnips because we find the skin bitter, and I peeled the larger turnip but left the skin on the smaller one as per the Internet's reccomendations).

Chop everything into large chunks, try to keep the size uniform.

Put everything into a large stock pot, except the pasta shapes and cooked kidney beans. (As you can see, mine was ALMOST too small. [5L] I could have used a smaller potato or something!)

Give it a gentle stir, so as not to overflow the pot, unless yours is ginormous.

Bring pot to a boil, then turn down and simmer for half an hour.

(At this point I turned it off and left it for about an hour while I went to pick Nadine up from work, so if you don't need to leave it just check to see if the vegetables are cooked.)

The pumpkin will be falling apart - this is good. If you want your pumpkin chunks to stay whole, don't put them in at the beginning.

I found that it was too watery still, so I thickened it with a bit of cornflour. This is optional.

Bring back to a boil and add the pasta and beans. Cook until pasta is ready (about as long as the packet says!) Cooking the pasta in it also helps to thicken the gravy!

Serve and enjoy! I served ours with some sauteed kale and silverbeet, but feel free to go for bread or something.

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This was so hearty and flavourful. If you aren't into spicy, cut down the pepper to half. It was very peppery, just how I like it! The herbs were light enough for us to be able to taste each different vegetable, which was good. I liked how the pumpkin turned into mush and spread through the whole thing, making it soupy. 

For something that I just made up on the spot, I'm quite happy with the results! I think this is the first time I've had turnips cooked properly. Last time I tried they were pretty thick and raw haha. I like them. I'll probably buy more next week and do something different.

This would be awesome to chuck in a slow cooker to come home to after work! Unfortunately I don't have one. One day I will, when I have more storage!

More noodly lunch

Today I was cruelly reminded of Saturday kiddie sports. I mapped out a seemingly simple 10km route using mapmyrun.com to get it nice and accurate, and at about 5km there is a sports field belonging to some college which is fine, EXCEPT the damn psycho parents were parked all along the footpath, road, and everywhere in between. So the screeching kids and screaming parents and whistles and HUGE GIGANTIC 4WD VEHICLES made me get lost and I ended up only doing just under 7km.

But oh well, it was still a fair chunk! And I finished in 1 hour 5 mins so I got faster at walking, hooray. I may yet fit 22km in 3 hours. Anyway, tomorrow I'm going to do 10km on my bike, on a different route! Do kids play sport on Sundays? Either way there's a nice steep hill in that route so I wouldn't be able to get my bike up it. I might go to the farmer's markets the long way. I haven't been there in ages.

The other night I accidentally intercepted Bob on the way to the loo and put her in a little tent Nadine got from her work for free. She disagreed. It's a bit funny that we were wathcing Shrek on telly at the time and that grey thing she's murdering? A donkey. Haha.

And now for a little bit of food!

In my previous entry, I mentioned a black bean and sweet potato salad I made. We ate in on Thursday night as a cold salad on the side of a pile of sauteed silverbeet in vegan margarine and some grileld tofu with a soy sauce and red wine vinegar marinade. I did end up buying a lime and squeezed some juice over it. It was pretty good, but the flavours seemed to dissipate as time went on. I had it for lunch the next day and had to fight to taste the garlic. Next time I'll make a proper sort of dressing.

Anyhow, I kept the marinade from the tofu and used it in this stir fry noodle bowl I made myself for lunch today, after my walk. It's basically a huge pile of noodles, 1 sliced carrot, a big handful of cashew nuts, a big handful of shredded red cabbage (is there any other kind?), sesame seeds, garlic, ginger and chilli.

Mmmm looking at that braised cabbage thing is making me want to make it again. Maybe red cabbage is in season and therefore will be cheap at the markets tomorrow. Hmm.

Lentil and Chestnut Soup

When I saw a packet of fresh chestnuts at a fruit shop last week for half the price as usual, I had to buy some. I have never ever eaten a chestnut before! I have always wanted to. I looked up instructions on the web for how to roast chestnuts, and most instructions were pretty much the same - cut an x in the top of the nuts, spread them in a single layer with the x facing up on a baking tray, and cook at 190 degrees C for about 30 minutes or until they look a bit like this:

Oh, they smelled good. (I tried one raw and it was strange, but quite tasty, however apparently if you eat a lot of raw chestnuts they can give you a stomach ache).

Then comes the difficult and time consuming part, the part that makes me not to want to buy them ever again...the peeling. As you can see in the above picture, a couple of nuts came out whole but most of it is a mushy mess. That's because I didn't actually roast them long enough, and they were too hard to peel and therefore we had to squeeze out the flesh! My thumbs were bleeding.

But the soup I chose to make with them was completely worth it. I knew I had come across a few recipes on Allotment 2 Kitchen using chestnuts before so I went there first to see what I felt like.

I chose the Lentil and Chestnut Soup. I made a couple of substitutions - I used fresh chestnuts instead of tinned (I ended up with 200g of pulp from 500g nuts) and I had no fennel seeds so I chucked in some dried marjoram (it was the first thing I saw!) I also used a few sprigs of fresh thyme from my garden istead of dried. And I had a 1/4 green cabbage going brown in the fridge so I chucked that in too.

We served it alongside toasted sourdough, which was unecessary as this soup is very hearty and filling! I suppose I COULD have used smaller bowls...

It was really unlike anything we have ever tasted before. The chestnuts added a sweet, almost meaty taste to the soup, and I enjoyed every mouthful! It was a pretty good birthday dinner. :)

I probably will end up buying chestnuts again, as they come more into season. I'll just be prepared for hurt thumbs, or just cook them longer and cut bigger x's. Are there such thing as Australian grown chestnuts? I forgot to read the label at the fruit shop, I was too excited, haha.

Wholemeal Carrot and Currant Muffins

I'm a muffin person, not a cake person. Though I do like the odd bit of cake sometimes :)

Anyway I fully intended on making these delicious sounding carrot muffins from Wayfaring Chocolate, but I found all this other stuff in my cupboard, and grated too much carrot, even for a doubled recipe which is what I intended...So it's practically a whole new muffin!

These aren't very sweet (trying to cut back on sugar) so you may wish to add a little more.

Wholemeal Carrot and Currant Muffins

Makes 12 regular and 9 mini muffins

Ingredients
2 cups wholemeal flour
4 tsp baking powder
4 tbsp dark brown sugar
1 tsp ground nutmeg
2 tbsp sunflower seeds
2 cups coarsely grated carrot

1 ½ tbsp chia seeds
5 tbsp water
1 tsp vanilla extract
300ml soy milk
2 tbsp unrefined coconut oil

¼ - ½ cup currants

Method
Preheat oven to 200 degrees Celcius. Grease a regular muffin tin and half a mini muffin tin. Or, it will probably make 15 regular sized muffins.
Mix together chia seeds and water. Set aside to thicken.

In a large bowl mix together all dry ingredients and grated carrot.
In another bowl whisk together the vanilla, soy milk, coconut oil and the chia egg. (The more energetic you are with whisking, the more your muffins will rise, apparently. I can't remember where I read that. PPK?)
Mix wet into dry until just combined. Fold through currants. Divide mix evenly among muffin holes and bake for 20-25 minutes (yes, even the little ones!) I cooked mine for 20 minutes and they came out very moist. You may want to leave them in a bit longer.
 
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I love taking muffins to work to eat on my morning tea break. I'm usually starving by then so a good wholemeal muffin really fills the hole. I usually take two, and have them with a cup of tea and a muesli bar.

Date day!

Today Nadine and I had the day off together (yay!) so we decided to have a date day rather than just sit around watching telly which is what we usually end up doing.

First there was breakfast. I made buckwheat pancakes again, but we had no maple syrup so we squeezed a lemon over the top and melted a little bit of margarine on them. Delicious. I also used straight buckwheat flour, not half and half. Didn't make a difference at all, I thought they might be a little dry but nope. Perfect. I topped them with some fried sliced banana.

Nadine drinking yummy cocktail

I got to choose the restaurant, so I picked Ginga Japanese restaurant because we haven't been there for ages. We started off with a cocktail - sake, gin, ginger ale, lemon and pickled ginger slices. Mmm. The sugar in it kind of gave us a headache though, haha. That's the problem with giving things up! 

Nadine ordered the bento. Clockwise from left: PLain rice with black sesame, vege tempura (eggplant, sweet potato, carrot, zucchini and capsicum) steamed vege and tofu, inari zushi and an egg sushi, Ignore that we didn't eat it haha.

We of course has edamame on the side. Can't go to a Japanese restaurant without edamame!

I had this massive bowl of veges in broth with some bean thread noodles, rice, miso soup and pickled things. Yuuuum.

The glands in my throat have been acting up over the last few days (tmi? Ha) so I ended the lovely day with a green juice :) Silver beet, carrot, orange, ginger. Hopefully it all goes away because I can't afford any days off work!

While we were in the city we walked past a little cafe that said they had vegan sweet options on a sign outside so after lunch we went and had a delicious piece of (sugary!) cake. It was chocolate with mint icing. And we found beetroot in it. It was pretty good. I forgot to take a picture though :)

I got my juicer out of hiding

Want a drink so potent it'll make your eyes water?

The last few days I've been feeling a little lethargic and gacky in the throat. Uhh, nuh uh. No way am I getting sick - haven't been sick for years and don't intend on starting now.

Potent Juice of Doom

Juice together, in order:

2 cm chunk of ginger

1 large garlic clove

1/2 a small onion

1 red sweet chilli or a chunk of capsicum (red or yellow)

2 med-large carrots

1 lemon or 1 small orange

Drink up! It's pretty spicy from the ginger, I liked the version with the orange better, it took the edge off a bit, but both were delicious. I'm going to keep this up for a couple more days and I'm pretty sure I'll never ever get sick again.

Don't want Allium spp. breath?

Chew a fresh sprig of parsley! I got no complaints from my girlfriend ;)



Loaf!



Housewifery!

I baked some muffins today! these Carrot Spice Muffins from FatFreeVegan blog. They turned out perfectly! I had heaps of carrots in the fridge to use before they went bad (I bought a 2kg bag at the farmer's markets because we usually use carrots in everything! Haven't used them once. I resorted to taking carrot sticks to work.) Anyway really yummy muffins. Make them. They are tasty AND healthy.

I made this DELICIOUS loaf for dinner tonight. There aint nothing like a good vege loaf. I think I've found my Christmas dinner :) It is Beetloaf by The Stripey Cat. It held together really really well even though I cut it almost as soon as I got it out of the oven. We had it with steamed corn, brocolli, carrots and beans from the garden.

It's a little blurry but the loaf is bright pink and yummy.

And Bob looked too cute today, dozing (literally all day) on the spare bed. :)

Another purple risotto!

Rainbow Risotto

Serves 4

Ingredients:

1 cup arborio rice

1/2 cup vodka

about 5 cups stock, mixed up with 2 bay leaves and a teaspoon of dried basil left to simmer on stove

1 carrot, chopped

1 zucchini, chopped

1/2 red capsicum, chopped

1/2 cup frozen corn kernels

1/2 cup frozen peas

5-6 cloves garlic, chopped

Almost a whole 1/2 red cabbage

Sprinkle of nutritional yeast

1 tsp vegan margarine

Balsamic vinegar and lemon juice to serve

Method:

Fry all vegetables except the cabbage in a little bit of oil until just starting to soften. Put in the arborio rice and stir until slightly translucent. Add the vodka, stirring until it's all absorbed. Then continue to add stock until rice is almost cooked. Stir in the cabbage and some more stock and let cook until cabbage is slightly wilted and stock absorbed. If needed continue adding stock until rice is tender.

When done, stir through the vegan margarine and the nutritional yeast.

Serve on a plate with a squeeze of lemon juice and some balsamic vinegar if you like!

This is a great way to use up the last little bits of vegetables in the fridge, but you don't want to make a stir fry. This tasted really fresh and summery. Make it with whatever you have on hand!

For dessert we had this:

Also made to get rid of excess crap in the fridge/freezer. We had one lonely sheet of puff pastry left that was taking up too much room and a little bit of leftover strawberry sauce I made a while ago. I bought a tin of apricots yesterday - they were discounted to $1.50. I put them in the pastry, folded it over into a triangle and brushed it with melted vegan margarine. I even sprinkled sugar on top! (Well I actually use powdered dextrose instead of sugar but it's essentially the same thing. You buy it in the home brew section for about $3 a kilo. It's packed with carbohydrate glucose energy but doesn't have the bad-for-you part of sugar in it...or something like that. Don't quote me.) Anyway, I baked it and served it with strawberry sauce.

I am never making it again! It was delicious but waaayyyy too sweet for my belly. I feel sick now! I much prefer sweet pastries to be shortcrust...it was still good though :)

Even better than the real thing - 'ricotta' + spinach stuffed pasta shells

We suddenly have kitchen cupboards and jars overflowing with various shaped pasta...which is good because I'll never need to buy pasta again, and it's all fancy brands haha. For about a week Nadine was bringing home packets that had holes in them etc, can't be sold but can still be eaten! One of the shapes were these giant shells, perfect for stuffing. So I followed a recipe from Skinny Bitch in the Kitch for vegan stuffed shells. Fantabulous. The 'ricotta' is literally just firm tofu, olive oil, oregano and garlic whizzed in a blender until smooth. It literally tastes like and has the same texture as the real thing - only difference was that it didn't give me a stomach ache as soon as I ate some.

I know it's pretty much just a recreation of the only option a lot of restaurants (particularly pubs) offer vegetarians, but you know, sometimes you just want squishy cheese and spinach stuffed pasta. This is just a tastier and healthier version of it. Good to give to omnivorous family and friends. You can't even tell the difference. I'll be using this ricotta recipe for my homemade ravioli next time I decide to pull out the machine. I don't why I haven't before :)

I have been juicing up a storm since I got my juicer last week. I've got all sorts of vegetables in the fridge to use (I read somewhere that if you have too much of one thing too often you can actually become allergic to it - wouldn't it be tragic if I was allergic to carrots?) from carrots to fennel. I found a delicious sounding recipe with celery, fennel and cucumber juiced together. I know you are supposed to avoid mixing (according to a fresh fruit and veg guide to women's health I picked up in the fruit shop), but I don't know if I could do straight fennel. I'm not really the biggest licorice fan - then again, I've never eaten fennel in my life so who knows, I might love it.

Anyway this juice is beetroot, carrot and celery. (Root vegetables are ok together). I think this is my favourite combination so far, I just love beetroot juice. The carrot and the celery seem to take away the 'earthy' taste that people (Nadine) don't seem to like about raw beetroot.

Recipe:

1/2 large beetroot, peeled and cut to fit in juicer

3 med/large carrots

1 large stick celery

Juice each vegetable. Mix together. Drink :) Makes enough for one.

This morning I decided to adapt a recipe I found in Karma Cookbook 'Agar Agar Drink'. It's supposed to help relieve constipation, and let me tell you, it works. The original recipe called for 600ml sugar free organic apple juice, but I can't afford to buy that and I can't stand the regular kind you get in the supermarket. Way too sweet. So I juiced two large fresh granny smith apples with my juicer - this made about 250ml, and then I diluted it with 50ml of water. I made half the recipe.

Note: nothing compares to the deliciousness of freshly squeezed apple juice. Nothing.

Ingredients:

300ml apple juice

pinch of salt

1 tsp agar agar flakes

Pour into a saucepan and bring to the boil. Simmer for ten minutes. Drink hot.

Now, I forgot to read the whole thing so I didn't simmer it for ten minutes and therefore my agar agar wasn't quite fully dissolved. But I just ate it with a spoon when I got to the end :) This was so delicious. It took a few minutes to get used to hot apple juice, but it tasted kind of like apple pie without the spices.

With the vegetable pulp left in the juicer at the end I made these burger patties. I can't remember what exactly I put in them (I really should have written it down) but next time I make them I will. I hate wastage. Other things I could do with the pulp could be adding it to pasta sauces or stir frys, or muffins. I've read somewhere that the pulp is tasteless because all the taste and nutrients come out with the juice, but I think because my juicer is old and second hand it doesn't quite get all the juice it could out so the pulp is still quite tasteful. Obviously not as much as if the vegetable was whole, but doesn't taste of cardboard. So I may as well use it :)