Mexican inspired salad!

I finally got a new camera charger in the mail today! Woohoo! I forgot how to use it. BUT it means I can now start taking pictures again, I was going a little crazy. I even have a recipe. As you may or may not know, the salads I like best include carbs and more carbs, and protein...they generally aren't greens based unless it's on the side of something.

Ingredients:

Serves 4-6

1 cup dry wheat berries, soaked overnight and then cooked (should make about 2 cups)

1 punnet cherry tomatoes, sliced in half long ways

Kernels from one cob of corn

1 cup cooked black beans

1 cup cooked pinto beans

1 spring onion, sliced thinly

As much spinach leaves as you like

Dressing -

3 tbsp red wine vinegar

2 tbsp jalapeno hot sauce (I use this stuff)

2 tbsp extra virgin olive oil

Mix all the salad ingredients together. In another bowl whisk the dressing until combined. pour on salad, and mix that. Easy peasy! I am pretty excited about eating it for lunches this week.

Serve with some avocado to make it even more yummy.

The jalapeno sauce has coriander and mango in it - it's so so so good. And reasonbly priced (not that I can remember how much). I'm not sure how you'd substitute it, maybe a fresh chopped jalapeno, fresh mango and dried coriander...or fresh corinander but that tastes like soap. Let me know if you try it!

Enchiladas + Lentil Loaf

We have been very busy doing nothing. On Sunday I made a big pot of chili (black bean and kidney bean and quinoa) and we've been eating that. Last night we turned it into a sort of enchilada thing:

We wrapped the chili mix up in flat bread things, topped it with tomato sauce/salsa (tin tomatoes, garlic, olives, onion, sliced fresh jalapeno) and grated a little bit of Cheezly cheddar on top with a heaping of nutritional yeast.

It tasted like pizza. Mmm. Cheezly white cheddar style is quite good.

Tonight Nadine made dinner: a Lentil and tofu loaf from Easy Vegan Cooking by Leah Leneman, with roasted potatoes and chunky mushroom gravy from Vegan on the Cheap. I steamed up some edamame to put on the side for something green on the plate. The loaf was pretty damn good (ingredients: red lentils, onion, tahini, miso paste).

(I've been slack in adding up serving prices! I really haven't bought much.)

Mum got me a new digital camera for my birthday! I've been playing with it. It's a sony Cybershot 14.1 mega pixel. I went and bought it myself - Myer had them really, really cheap. Really cheap.

Blurry Bob. Bob wasn't feeling well for a few days and enjoyed lots of scracthes. :) She usually stalks off or glares at the mention of a cuddle!

And grumpy Charlee doesn't like being picked up. Heh heh.

I made a couple of recipes from the PPK :)

I stumbled upon this recipe for 'Chesapeake Tempeh Cakes' on the Post Punk Kitchen blog and had to try it. I'm always on the look out for ways to eat tempeh that isn't disgusting. This is definately one of them.

Look how disgusting tempeh looks! It's like congealed set vomit with lumpy bits, and not cooked properly that's kinda what it tastes like. This one was actually the cheapest one in the store - I got it at $4.75 for 125g. I chose it because it had chilli bits in it as you can see, and I thought that'd probably make it taste better again. Another thing wrong with tempeh is that it's so damn expensive. Last time I used a tofu-tempeh mixed block which was a good stepping stone (and cheaper at about the same price for twice as much), this time we were ready for the real stuff.

Man these cake things were good. As you can see from the top picture I served it with steamed mixed veges (carrot, home grown beans, farmer's market white radish, a very sweet yellow squash and some asparagus) and some steamed-then-grilled potatoes. Oh, and a chunk of extremely delicious organic avocado I couldn't resist picking up at the same store I got the tempeh from.

The little patties were very easy to form (I think they would make a good burger pattie or sausage if rolled into the right shape). I made mine smaller than the recipe did because I made 14 instead of 10. We had enough to eat for lunch today :) I also made heaps of the veges and reheated them today as well.

Yum. Pretty sure that I'll be using this recipe quite a bit as I start to be able to afford tempeh a little more often :)

This is another thing I made from the Post Punk Kitchen blog - Chickpea Picatta. It's a very simple dish of chickpeas (duh), garlic, onion, capers and white wine. I was so excited at finding a recipe with chickpeas that WASN'T a curry that I couldn't wait to make it and it didn't dissapoint. Though the greens I chose to serve it on (I bought some chicory at the farmer's market as I'd never had it before) were a little too bitter for the dish it was still really delicious overall. Nadine didn't mind the bitter though. I also decided to serve it on mashed potatoes as the recipe suggests - but since I don't like mashed potatoes I mashed in a parsnip with it, and it worked.

Unless you can find a really cheap vegan white wine to use in this recipe, it's not THAT cheap to make (well, compared to other recipes I make) but we just drank the rest of the bottle with dinner so there was no wastage! Well I had beer, someone else finished all the wine ;)

I cooked up a massive batch of chickpeas (they take so damn LONG) and have frozen the rest to use later. I'm using some tonight as a matter of fact, in a recipe from a cookbook I just bought myself, I am very excited about trying a recipe.

Chilli bean (no)quesadillas with salad

Ever since I got my sandwich press I've been trying to think of delicious things to squash in it. I wanted it in the first place because a favourite snack of mine was a baked bean-and-cheese toasted sandwich...of course I don't eat cheese any more so it's been kind of hard to think of things, because melting is the fun part! haha.

Anyway, we have thought of heaps since then, and this is one of them. I did splurge and buy some vegan cheese which I'd read had excellent melting ability (important). I rarely ever buy vegan cheese (tofutti better than cream cheese is an exception because it really is better than cream cheese) one, because of the hideous expensiveness, and two, because before I was vegan, I was a huge cheese eater (I worked in a gourmet Italian delicatessen for over a year before I couldn't stand it any more - we got to eat the cheese and olives [and meat ugh] for free so we could tell the customer what it was like. I just made stuff up about the meat) and imitation cheese just does not cut it. Not here in Australia anyway, our choices are rather limited. (I'm very curious about this wonder daiya from the US - maybe Australia will import it...in a million years).

Cheezly super melting edam style is what I decided on. I've had other cheezly before and it was really quite yuck. I can't remember which one it was. This one was fine - it actually melted, and the taste wasn't offensive. I wouldn't say it tasted anything like real edam cheese, but what can you expect? Haha.

I also bought some sour cream - it's chilli, you gotta have sour cream! ...I knew I should have got the Tofutti brand one. I've had that before and it's divine. This one? Tasted like yoghurt. Sweet sweet yoghurt. It's supposed to be sour! Oh well - plus side, it's relatively cheap, and I read the ingredients and it has probiotic cultures in it so I'm going to try and use it as a starter for the soy yoghurt I want to make myself. Commercial stuff is way too sweet to be healthy. The sugar probabaly kills the cultures. And vegan starter culture is impossible to find here. I was going to ask my favourite vegan store (just opened up the road, hooray!) to order some in, but I'll try this first.

Anyhow, the food.

I made up a bean chilli recipe from the Oxfam cookbook (pretty much the same as any other Mexican bean chili recipe - beans, tomatoes, cumin, chilli peppers, onion, capsicum, garlic).

Yum. ALWAYS a good fallback if I can't think of anything to cook. Or if you feel like you're getting a cold.

The recipe said to mash half the cooked beans and stir them into the chilli mixture, but I kept them seperate and just mixed in the whole beans. The mashed ones I spread (or tried to, they were dry - next time I'll mash with some water) onto some round multigrain wraps (make sure yours are vegan. Many of them use glycerine as a humectant and rarely specifys which kind), grated some of the cheezly edam on top and folded it over and squished in the sandwich press. The cheezly melted, but it would have worked better if the bean mush was hot when I grated it on. (I made this in stages through the day).

I served the (no)quesadillas with some of the chilli on top, with a dollop of yoghurt sour cream and a side salad with: nasturtium, spinach, yellow capsicum, red onion, kalamata olives, green beans, sunflower seeds, balsamic vinegar and olive oil. There was avocado but I forgot to put mine on!

This was a very satisfying meal to make. The cheezly was a treat. I doubt I'll buy anymore until I have a full time well paying job. Hur, hur.

Chili :)

The other night I made the Chacha Chili from the Skinny Bitch cookbook :) It's pretty delicious, and probabaly the cheapest thing to make in the entire book. It's gonna last us a while. The first night we had it with steamed pumpkin and brocolli with sweet chili sauce and a glob of hummus, and a few slices of grilled tofu that was marinated in red wine vinegar and soy sauce. Next time I will marinate it longer though, but it was a last minute decision. I drizzled all the leftover marinade over the vegetables and tofu. It was rather delicious.

Last night we had it with steamed sweet potato (I got a kilo bag at the fruit shop for 89 cents), brocolli (was on special for $2.99/kg at said fruit shop) and some carrots (always cheap :))

If you have the book, the recipe says to use 4 tablespoons of chili powder - pretty sure that's a typo - I used 4 teaspoons and it was almost too hot but not quite. It also took longer to cook than outlined in the recipe but I just left it there and it turned out perfect. I also used 100g dry soybeans instead of 100g of the kidney beans, to mix it up a bit. It works.

A very high protein meal. I'll have to use it, ha.