Some Food We Ate This Week

I love food. I love thinking about food making food and eating food. I love having enough of a variety of stuff in my 'pantry' that I can come home and just throw some ingredients in a pot and call it a nutritional meal:

This is a pantry curry-like meal, it was so quick to make, neither of us knew what we felt like and this sort of thing is usually what I make in that sort of situation. Bonus points for having tins of tomatoes in the pantry and not having to go to the shops! I don't measure anything for this type of throw together but here are the ingredients: about 1 1/2 cups cooked chickpeas, 1 400g tin crushed or chopped tomatoes, most of a medium sized cauliflower, onion, carrot, the end of a bag of mung bean sprouts, spring onions, about half a block of soft tofu I found lurking in the fridge (it disintegrated), and a fair chunk of garam masala powder and some dried chilli flakes. I think I served it on brown rice. No garlic left, decided I didn't care. Oh, I also grated some fresh ginger in the last few minutes of cooking because ginger makes everything better.

Terrible photo, I was in a rush to eat it.

This meal I planned! All day at work I'd been thinking about how I haven't had eggplant for a while, so by the end of the day I wanted it pretty bad. I also felt like lentils for the same reason - they are so quick to cook and are delicious, why then don't I use them more often? So I picked up my copy of Appetite for Reduction and found Lentil & Eggplant Chilli Mole on page 242. Mmm cocoa powder in a non-sweet dish. It always freakes me out a little, I mean, it sounds gross. It really does. But I have made a mole before (I'm sure I would have posted about it, it being so weird to me and all but I can't find it), decided I like chocolate spicy things and this one had both eggplant AND lentils in it so it was a winner. I served it with the suggested Corn and Scallion Corn Bread from page 244 of the same book and it was delicious. I love corn bread. I should also make THAT more often! 

The supermarket didn't have any of the big eggplants left so I had to buy a kilo of the little lebanese ones. I swear there was like a hundred of them. Cutting up one big one is sooo much easier than slicing a million little ones. They were the same price though, so it was okay. I thought it wasn't all going to fit but it cooks down quite nicely. One thing I find confusing about US recipes - the amount of chilli powder called for. Often it'll say a few tbsp of the stuff! (I just read this recipe again and it specifies mild, there's my answer.) Australian chilli powder (I just buy the stuff from the fruit shop) must be like a bazillion times hotter than American, a tsp or two is usually plenty, and I like spicy heat.

Onto a breakfast! I can't remember when exactly I made this, probably Sunday. For a plethora of deliciously interesting pancake recipes, go to Chocolate Covered Katie's blog. These are the Apple Pie pancakes, but Nadine had stolen my apple I had my sights on so I used a grated pear instead. Just as delicious I am sure! I made the Vanilla Ice Milk too, sort of - I should have frozen it the night before but I didn't, so I was lazy and had semi frozen blended almond milk on top of my pancakes. The semi frozen almond milk was freakin delicious by the way - almond milk is probably going to be my ice cream milk of choice when I finally buy my ice cream maker. I have no patience for the freezing and stirring business.

I'm so glad I love to cook. I have no idea what else I'd be doing with my spare time!

Mmm carbs

Best flavour combination. Nadine and I went out and drank a fair amount of wine last night and the results are always NEED CARBS NOW and this is usually my fall back hangover lunch.

Long pasta, cliced chilli and garlic (and optional sliced olives and sundried tomato). Plonk a knob of nuttlex on top and voila.

This is what Bob does when it's stormy, like this morning. It's so sad :(

And this is what Charlee does when it thunders! We woke up this morning and found her under the covers too!

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.

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!

Vegan Chilli

Who needs another freakin vegan chilli recipe when there are 2340873259872395715 billion out there on the web already? Every vegan cookbook I own has a chilli recipe in it. But if you're like me, and try a new recipe every time you make it, just in case there is an even better one, then why not post another recipe, I say! Ha. Especially since this one was pretty delicious.

This one makes a huge pot. Halving it would work fine.

Three-Bean Chilli (or, Another Vegan Chilli)

Serves 9

Ingredients

4 garlic cloves, chopped

1 huge onion, sliced

200g carrots, diced

100g celery, diced

1.5 cups cooked kidney beans

1.5 cups cooked white (cannellini) beans

1.5 cups cooked black eye peas (or 1x400g can of each, or any kind of bean you like)

1 cup 'chicken' stock (I use Massel)

1 x 800g can tomatoes

2 bay leaves

1 tbsp dried oregano

1/2 tbsp ground cumin

1 tbsp hot chilli powder (more or less to taste)

First, fry (in oil or water) onion and garlic until soft. Add to the pan the carrots and celery and cook them til soft.

Chuck in the rest of the ingredients and bring to the boil. Once boiling turn down the heat and simmer until it's more 'saucy' and not watery. I think I did mine for about half an hour.

Serve on top of something - rice, quinoa, barley, pasta? Whatever you like! Easiest chilli ever. Actually they are all kind of easy.

This makes up for the expensive last post - About 70 cents per serve (not including the grain base if you use one, and there would be less serves if you didn't have a grain base.)

This was really pretty good for me just chucking things in the pot. I couldn't be bothered getting out a recipe book and I'm pretty sure chilli usually has cumin and oregano in it. Well it does now. The 1 tbsp of hot chilli was fine for us, but firey-toothed people may want to add more, (or less if you're chicken).

Charlee likes to sit in awkward places.

This is a very, very rare occurence. In fact they can barely stand being in the same room as each other. We don't mind fitting ourselves around the cat's comfort, especially if they BOTH want to sleep with us haha.

Ah, cats. Endless amusement you are. Except when you dig up my carrot and bean seeds. Gah.