Recipe: Vegan Beef and Stout Stew

Stout beer. Mmm delicious. Pity most brands use isinglass in the fining process. Dang. BUT I looked and looked (it was hard, because I'm not too knowledgable on beer brands) and found that Coopers makes a vegan friendly stout beer! (Bonus points for being Aussie owned and made). And thus this stew was born. (Inspired by this recipe from Martha Stewart).

For the beef part I used this stuff. Found it in the freezer in an Asian supermarket. I'm not entirely sure of it's brand. There are words everywhere. I think it's essentially frozen rehydrated TVP chunks, and it pretty much has the same texture as the type of cow you'd buy to slow cook. Except you don't have to break your jaw chewing on it. (Ew.)

Vegan Beef and Stout Stew

Serves 6

Ingredients:

3 1/2 cups of beef style pieces, defrosted (or rehydrated beef style TVP slices)

2 tbsp wholemeal flour*

170g tomato paste

500g potatoes, diced in 2cm bits

1 large onion, diced

5 garlic cloves, sliced

1 carrot, diced

1 celery stalk, diced

400mL beef style stock (I use massel)

220mL vegan stout beer

2 cups frozen peas, defrosted

Salt and pepper to taste

Method:

Saute onion, garlic, carrot, celery and potatoes in some oil or water in a large stock pot for about 5 minutes. Add flour and stir until it starts to brown. Stir in stock, tomato paste and stout beer so no lumps form. It will thicken a bit. You may need to add extra water if it's too thick. I added about an extra cup. (*I used 3 tbsp flour and I think it was too much). Stir in defrosted beef chunks.

Bring to a boil and then turn down and simmer for about 15 minutes or until potatoes are tender. Add peas. Cook until heated through and sauce has thickened. Taste for seasoning.

I served mine on bowtie pasta because I like pasta with stews. But you could try quinoa, brown rice...anything else really :)

A stew is the ultimate comfort food and this one doesn't disappoint. The gravy is rich and thick and we wanted to eat the whole pot! I reckons the leftovers will make a GREAT pie. So that is what I'm going to do. If the gravy isn't pie-thickness I'll just reheat it on the stove with some cornflour or something, but I don't think it'll need it. Making leftovers into a pie with perhaps a steamed green thing on the side will stretch it out to at least 8 servings I think. Depends how much pie you can eat ;). 

This reminds me a lot of something my mum used to make sometimes, except I remember disliking it immensely. Don't know why. I guess tastes change.

I would definately serve this to family, friends, anybody who enjoyed a good stew. If they didn't see me eating it I'm sure they would all think it was the 'real deal'. If you aren't a fan of fake meat, try using tofu, tempeh, muchrooms, or even a bean. I think mushrooms would be especially delicious (and much more accessible to everyone! I know not all of us live in a city with plentiful asian food marts.)  

Gardener's Pie

I really felt like lentils because I haven't had them for ages. I've been using up my millions of packets of split peas first. (I've only got 1kg left! haha. I couldn't walk past 500g packs of split peas for 50c without buying at least 10 of them). I thought about using the split peas in this meal but decided it wouldn't quite work for me.

Gardener's Pie

Serves 6

Ingredients

250g green/brown lentils

2 carrots, diced

1 large zucchini, diced

100g mushrooms, thickly sliced

1 onion finely chopped

4 cloves garlic finely chopped

1 tbsp mixed Italian herbs

400g can chopped tomatoes*

750ml chicken style stock

The greens from one bunch of beetroot, well washed and roughly chopped**

1kg potatoes, washed and cooked and made into mash. We make ours with a little soy milk, nutritional yeast, margarine and pepper.

Pretty pretty

Method

Prepare mashed potatoes. Set aside.

In a large stock pot, saute the onion and garlic until it begins to soften. You can do this in oil or water - I used coconut oil. Add the carrots, lentils, stock, herbs and can tomatoes. Bring to a boil then turn down to a simmer and cook until lentils are soft/edible. It may run out of water, so keep an eye on it. Just add more, 1/2 cup at a time if this happens.

Stir in the mushrooms, zucchini and beetroot greens. Cook until mushrooms have softened and greens have wilted.

Pour into a casserole/lasagne dish and spread potatoes on top. Sprinkle with herbs, nutritional yeast or pepper if desired.

Turn oven to 180 degrees Celcius and bake for 1/2 an hour or until potatoes are crispy on the top!

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*ALDI sells cans of organic chopped tomatoes for $1.29! Or non-organic ones for 69c (at the moment). I was pretty excited, I bought 3 cans.

** Spinach, silverbeet, kale or any other kind of leafy green can be substituted for this. Even frozen spinach (just add to the pot earlier, or defrost first). I just had beetroot greens on hand. Speaking of beetroot I should really use those before they go soft.

          

This is an excellent meal to cook up when broke or in need of something hearty, filling and comforting, and you can't be bothered cooking rice. It reheats well and could be frozen to have another time. You could use whatever veges you have on hand - I had mushrooms to use up but I probably wouldn't go buy them specifically for this, for example. Celery would be a good addition. Frtozen peas or beans would be too :) It ended up costing me about $1.50 per serve.

Cleaning out the Pantry

This week I have been so broke I am cleaning out my cupboards and my fridge and my freezer before I buy any more groceries. (My car was almost a year over due for a service and the bill showed it!!! Oh well, now it isn't going to explode.)

Anyway, the above picture is a salad I made on Sunday to take to work for lunches. I based it on something out of Concious Cooking. It's basically: quinoa, red onion, half a cucumber, 1 grated carrot, spinach leaves, orange and spring onions. The dressing is made from rice bran oil, orange juice and red wine vinegar. It was delicious. All the flavours worked very well together and I enjoyed my lunches immensely.

We are having more leftovers of this one tonight. It's also from Concious Cooking and I was a bit wary of it because I decided a little while ago that I did not like fennel (as in the fresh bulb, not the dried seed or herb). I bought it to juice fresh and it ruined the flavour of everything.  However, to my taste buds surprise, fennel tastes completely different when cooked! Thank god. The recipe is called 'Whole Wheat Penne with san Marzano tomatoes'. I just used a tin of Australian tomatoes, kalamata olives instead of stuffed green, red wine instead of white wine, and skipped the tarragon. It was a delicious meal and I am glad we have more to eat tonight. I'll be throwing in a can's worth of white beans to stretch it out a bit. (I cook dried beans and freeze them in zip lock bags in 1 1/2 cup amounts).

I think this weekend I'll be busting out a lentil and black eyed pea curry that'll feed an army.

Tomorrow we are having friends over so we're making nachos and having beer. Hopefully Nadine buys the beer! Apparently white beans and green peas make a good substitute guacamole (according to Robin Robertson's Vegan on the Cheap) so I'll just buy 1 avo instead of two and try that! I'll let you know how it passes with the friends. There is also a recipe for vegan sour cream in that book, so I'm going to give that a go. I already make my own mayo, why not sour cream!?

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.

A few new dishes we have had this week

Sweet potato arancini (modified from a Women's weekly magazine recipe) and side salad of baby spinach, mixed olives, nasturtium flowers and leave with balsamic vinegar. Nasturtium leaves and flowers are my new discovery. I love them. My neighbour's nasturtium is running everywhere...and through my fence. Score. I may steal a few plants from school and put them in my garden and see if they grow. I have not much sun :(

Vegetable Biriyani (South Africa) from the Oxfam Shop Vegetarian Cookbook. Hearty, comforting, delicious, cheap.

I also made some Almond-Quinoa muffins from Veganomicon but the pictures sucked. But they are my new favourite muffins. I used leftover almond meal from making milk, dried a bit in the oven for about half an hour.

I've found a new love in chia seeds.

I bought a whole organic pumpkin and I'm going to cook up a storm with it this week. I am very excited :)