Basic necessities

Chocolate coated strawberries and cream.

Cream: 2 parts vegan cream cheese, 2 parts vegan marg (beat until smooth), 1 capful of vanilla essence (beat) and 1 part rice syrup (beat until fluffy). Add more rice syrup to taste. Amazing. I ate too much of it and now I feel ill. Of course.

We went to a strawberry farm and picked our own. They are divine.

Before our strawberry farm adventure we went walking in the Glass house mountains. It was a perfect day for it. We started with a mountain view lookout...(and my mug).

Then went on a circuit walk around Mt. Tibrogargan.

For ages I've been saying 'we should go up north more often and do bushwalks and stuff' and the months tick by, so this weekend we got in the car and went. It was so nice. We didn't see any koalas though :( Nadine was very disappointed.

I did see these pretty flowers though (and a stupid woman who was trampling the bush and picking every single flower she saw - she took pretty much the whole bush of a little purple pea-style flower...the exact kind of flower I wanted to see blooming!) Does anyone know what it is? The leaves are very sharp/spiny.

Happy Sunday

Today has been one of those days where you sit on the couch thinking about all the things you should be doing rather than browsing through millions of food blogs and drinking cups of tea. I think it's because we bought a brand new doona yesterday. Yes I am blaming my blankets now. It's so soft and cushy and (not wool, feather or down!) warm and comfortable I decided to not get out of bed for ages, which of course set me up for the rest of the day.

Though I did manage to attempt to do some sort of yoga before breakfast (which was porridge with banana and peanut butter), but only did about 3 different poses (including a few sun salutes) because I am getting increasingly annoyed with my lack of ability to touch my toes. Motivation for yoga has been hard to come by since I crashed my bike (funnily enough, so has cycling) even though my wrist is FINE and getting stronger everyday with all the heavy lifting we seem to be doing at work lately. I know I know, I just have to get off my ass and just do it. I know I'll like it! I bought a new yoga DVD yesterday in the hopes that it would motivate me but within the first 5 minutes it rubbed me up the wrong way so bad I turned it off and had a sook. Ah, hormones!

I made this delicious guacamole to have for a mid morning snack (instead of running! this would have been pefect for after a nice sweaty run). Mash 1 small avocado, stir in 5 chopped cherry tomatoes, a couple of tbsp of sour cream (I used the cashew sour cream from Addicted to Veggies - so good!), a dash of onion powder and black pepper. Stir and enjoy with corn chips or crudites or with a spoon.

I also managed to wash my car, which I've been meaning to do for a couple of weeks. I ended up getting a new  (used) car by the way hooray! And it got so filthy from all the dust while parking at work (so dry). So I vaccumed out all the potting mix and put in some floor mats to protect the carpet from my scummy work boots. While I was cleaning the back seats out I discovered they could sort of fold out (i'm not sure of the purpose of this) and underneath was a lovely history of the previous owners (or their children). They went to the beach a lot, ate lots of chips and drank cans of something. Mmmm. I washed the outside using only four buckets of water, and of course a huge storm has now rolled in and the rain clouds looks dark and ominous. Oh well, I enjoyed looking at it's shiny-ness when I walked down the stairs before!

For lunch I had this amazing bowl of soba noodles. I made a similar sauce with sunflower butter and soy sauce, only I added in some chilli flakes. The veges are a grated carrot, 2 grated radishes and all the greens from one bunch of radishes. I also put a handful of rye berry sprouts on top. Yum.

I bought a lifetimes supply of various noodles while in the Valley yesterday. (I also had vegan 'fish' at a little vegan/vegetarian asian restaurant but I didn't take my camera :( It tasted disturbingly like real fish, though I could tell it wasn't because it had the chewy texture of gluten).

Yesterday for an afternoon snack I made up some of this cream from Addicted to Veggies (I may be a little obsessed!) It would be amazing on peaches like in the original recipe but unfortunately they are not in season in Australia at the moment. Strawberries are, however, and we dipped them in the cream and thought about how amazing it would be as a frozen dessert...

Tomorrow I shall jump back on my exercise wagon, stop sooking about my lack of flexibility, and see if I can still run 3.5km (or 26 minutes) without stopping like I did last week! That was pretty exciting. It gave me confidence knowing I can probably run this 5k in less than 45 minutes or whatever it said I had to. Ha.

Pasta with Cream of Sweet Potato Sauce

I am so, so glad this week is over. Work has been torture. We haven't stopped weeding for weeks now. I don't think we are a maitenance team any more. We are the zombie team who weeds. There are holes worn through all of our gloves (I even wear two pairs at a time because I'm allergic to the plastic in the outside pair!), none of us have any fingerprints left. I even wrote a poem, one day in the monotony!

Emma's fingers, cracked, and bleeding.
Too much weeding.
Too much weeding.

On the upside it's been glorious weather and sitting outside in the sun has been lovely. (Except I'm now permanently attached to a 45 litre bucket. There are two ways to sit: upturned, or on the rim. Upturned hurts my back. On the rim hurts my legs. If I tried to weed these monstrosities standing up, both my legs and back would hurt! Can't win! Haha.)

Anyway, now that the weeding has ceased for the weekend (right back to it on Monday!) I can relax and enjoy some gin with lime, and some nice soft couch sitting while watching the Eurovision Song Contest. Hell, yes.

To the food! Because that IS what this blog is about, not weeds.

Last night I made a simple pasta meal, adapted from the Complete Vegetarian Barbecue Cookbook by Susan Geishopf-Hadler. One day I will actually have a barbecue, and can barbecue things. But this time I just used a frying pan.

Pasta with cream of sweet potato sauce
Serves 6

Ingredients

1 tbsp coconut oil
3 garlic cloves, chopped
1 large onion, chopped
2 birdseye chillies, chopped
1 kg sweet potato, diced small
500mL soy milk

2 tbsp vegan margarine
2 tbsp wholemeal flour
pinch of nutmeg
black pepper
500g pasta of choice
Method:
Put garlic, onion, chilli and sweet potato in a frying pan with the coconut oil. Cook until sweet potato is soft. You may need to deglaze with water every now and then, unless you have a non stick pan.

Transfer to a food processor (unless your processor is as big as your kitchen sink, you'll need to do it in batches) and blend with ½ cup of the soy milk. Set aside in a bowl.

Start cooking pasta about here.

In a medium saucepan, melt the vegan margarine. Whisk in the flour, and then slowly stir in the remaining soy milk. Stir in the nutmeg and as much black pepper as you like. Cook until slightly thickened.

Stir in the sweet potato mixture. Add some water if it's too thick for you.

Serve on top of cooked pasta :) I fried up some red capsicum as a garnish. Something green would have been nice! Maybe some scattered chives? :)

 

This meal cost us $1.20 per serve.

 

It was pretty good, we always like a bit of sweet potato. I don't think I can eat this dish more than twice though, so I've kept the remainder of the sauce to make a lasagne today or tomorrow.

 

Somehow this meal created dishes up to the ceiling! (Pretty sure there was already some there though). So now I have to spend all day doing them in my postage stamp sized sink. Oh well! Later today I intend on doing some more training for the half marathon (I am already getting fitter! It's awesome), and digging up my lemon grass.

 

(As an afterthought, I find I edit my posts a lot. Typos, etc. Does that mean the entry comes up in your reading whatsit five million times? If so, sorry!!! I'm trying hard not to need to edit any more!)

Creamy pasta sauce

Yesterday my sister was talking about how she was going to make carbonara for dinner that night. It made me really want carbonara for dinner. My thought pattern went straight to an alfredo sauce recipe I have made before, and I would just add some thinly sliced seitan (I use the Vegan on the Cheap recipe) into it to sub for the bacon, or pancetta or whatever it is that you use in carbonara. I thought I had everything for the recipe at home, so I didn't go get anything at the shops.

Of course I didn't have everything (I was missing the tofu, duh) so I just threw together this mess:

It actually worked out really well. It was in no way a carbonara (I couldn't even be bothered defrosting my seitan) but it is a creamy proteiny pasta sauce and it satisfied the craving. It's a good way to use up any okara you have leftover from soymilk making, I also chucked in some almond meal/pulp leftover from my almond milk making. It works, trust me. Next time I will use all soy/almond milk, but I had some coconut cream leftover in my fridge that I didn't want to waste.

Pasta with Cream Sauce (inventive, I know)
Serves 3-4

Ingredients
200ml light coconut cream
50ml soy milk (I just topped it up to 1 cup)
3 garlic cloves, crushed or grated
1/2 cup nutritional yeast (1/4 cup provides 400% reccomended daily value of B12 did you know?)
170g okara (what I had leftover from making milk with 100g dry soy beans)
1/4 cup almond pulp
1 cup 'chicken' stock
1 tbsp tahini
black pepper
1 tsp mixed herbs
1 tsp chilli powder
3 tbsp flour*

1 cup frozen green peas
1 cup cooked white beans

375g cooked pasta

Method

Put the first block of ingredients into a food processor and blend until smooth.

Put pasta on to cook, when almost done put mixture from the blender into a medium sauce pan on high heat. Stir until very thick. This won't take long. Stir through your beans and peas.

When pasta is done, drain it and return it to it's pot. Pour in the sauce and toss to combine.

Divide among plates and serve! We got three servings, but they were a little bit too big, so dividing it into four would probably be perfect.

So much of the okara I get from making soy milk gets wasted, which annoys me. I always have one lot in the freezer but never use it so I don't want to just keep freezing it all. However we have been using it lately! Such as in the above recipe, and the other week Nadine made an awesome lasagne and I told her to mix it into the plain tomato sauce. It made it quite meaty and cheesy tasting which we were pleased about. I'll use that trick again.

This ended up costing me $1 per serve (4).

*Next time I'll use only 2 tbsp flour.

Happy 2011 :)

We don't like to venture into the city on New Year's Eve. It's a frightening place, so we opted to stay home inside :) We made it into a date night (which seems to be becoming a tradition) so I cooked a simple 3 course meal and we bought some pink bubbly to drink in our fancy glasses :) It was nice.

I had been up since 4:30am because I had to start work early (and finish early because the boss wanted to get ready to party haha) so I was exhausted by 9:30pm. So we crashed and went to sleep. However, technically we were awake to ring in the new year because the fireworks from the city woke us up! We could see them from our front stairs, but there's one stupid tree that's in the way so we couldn't :( Oh well.

We started off with a little bowl of cleansing cucumber and ginger soup, recipe from Boy George's Karma Cookbook. It was surprisingly delicious! Not very flavourful, but it wasn't intended to be a main dish. Put a bit of chilli in this and it'd be perfect if you have a cold! (The ingredients are: cucumber, leek, lots of ginger, shiitake mushrooms, kombu seaweed, water, tofu and parsley for decoration.)

The main was the best. The recipe is from Robin Robertson's Vegan on the Cheap. Fusilli with Potatoes, Green Beans and Lemon Basil Creme. The creamy sauce was made from cashews, soy milk and lemon juice, basically. It's a pity I can't post the recipe. Maybe just buy the book, it's brilliant.

Now this is truly a crap picture. We have more for dessert tonight so I'll try to take a better photo! Ijust threw this together off the top of my head. I'll call it...Summer Fruit Freeform Tart with Balsamic Reduction. Yum.

Summer Fruit Freeform Tart with Balsamic Reduction

Ingredients
1 sheet square vegan puff pastry (I use Borg's)
*1 small nectarine, thinly sliced
*1 small peach, thinly sliced
*1 apricot, thinly sliced
*4 mulberries cut into thirds
Vegan margarine, for brushing on pastry before cooking

Half a cup of regular balsamic vinegar

Method
While letting the pastry defrost on the bench, pour the half cup of balsamic vinegar into a small saucepan. Turn element to it's lowest heat, and let vinegar reduce until thick. (Mine actually reduced all the way down to barely 2 tablespoons. It was very rich and sweet!) Set aside when it's done. I don't know how long it will take, just keep an eye on it.

When pastry is defrosted, cut across and down to make 4 squares.

Arrage slices of fruit in a fan (like in the photo) and top with the little bits of mulberry.

Smoosh sides of the squares of pastry up to surround the fruit so it won't go everywhere. Brush with melted margarine and put on a baking tray lined with baking paper. (I even buttered my paper because I was paranoid it would stick. It shouldn't.)

Turn oven to 200 degrees C. Cook pastries for about 25 minutes (I checked mine after 15, then every five minutes after that).

Serve warm with vanilla ice cream and drizzle with the balsamic reduction!

* Any fruit would work, really. Apples and strawberries? Banana and blueberries? Yum. Use whatever is in season and slice it thinly so it cooks in the oven :)

My mulberries were labelled as blackberries in the shops. They aren't :S Perhaps they are some sort of cross? Whatever they are, they were on special for $4.80 or something at Woolworths so I couldn't resist. Frozen berries would work perfectly as well.