Beans beans the magical fruit

This meal is so simple, yet turns out delicious. And it's so cheap! Inspired from a Chilean recipe in the Oxfam Vegetarian Cookbook.

Makes 6 servings

Ingredients:

500g dry red kidney beans (about 2.5 cups)

2 large onions, sliced

4 cloves garlic chopped

250g pumpkin

3 cups corn kernels (from 3 cobs, or frozen)

1 tsp oregano

1 tsp thyme

1 tsp chilli flakes

2 cups chicken style stock

Method:

Cook kidney beans (soak overnight, simmer for about 1 hour OR boil beans, let soak 1 hour, drain, and simmer in new water for about 1 hour) and set aside.

Fry onion and garlic in some oil (or water) until soft. Add pumpkin and corn kernels and cook until it starts to soften. Add beans, spices and stock, bring to boil and turn down to a simmer. Cook for 20 minutes and serve on rice! Or we used cracked wheat because I forgot to buy rice.

Guacamole!

Yes it does look like a big bowl o' vomit, but I just wanted to post that the trick with using some frozen peas and white beans in place of an avocado in guacmole was a success :) Idea from Robin Robertson's Vegan on the Cheap -

Guacamole

Makes a big soup bowl full

Ingredients

1 large avocado (I used a shepard avo)

1 cup frozen peas, defrosted

1 cup white beans

2 roma tomatoes, diced

1 garlic clove, grated/crushed

a generous amount of sweet chilli sauce

black pepper

juice of half a lemon

Roughly mash the avocado in a bowl

In a food processor, blend the beans, peas and garlic clove until very smooth.

Mix it all in a bowl with the other ingredients and eat!

We blobbed ours on top of vegan nachos, that I made up from 1 cans worth of kidney beans and 1 can's worth of white beans, mashed up, 1 onion, garlic, 1 cup of 'chicken' stock and a taco seasoning packet. I figured out that the secret ingredient to the deliciousness of taco seasoning is cumin. I bought the home brand version of it (instead of old el paso, for example) because it was less than half the price and the only difference in ingredients was the lack of cumin. So I juct chucked in some cumin with the packet :) Who doesn't have cumin in their spice rack? I put it on top of corn chips, covered the lot with vegan cheese (that we had left over from pizza night) and baked it in the oven until the cheese melted. The sour cream from the same book was also a success, though not quite as good as tofutti. But probably a lot better for us!

We also drank a carton of beer and watched bad movies til 3am, most of which were quite good. Except one. 'Bitch Slap'. It was so bad. Worst movie I've ever seen. I dare you.

Pizza night

We decided yesterday that it was about time for another pizza night.

This time the toppngs were: avocado, corn kernels, kidney beans, capers, kalamata olives, jarred jalapeno chillis, and the base sauce was made from cooked cherry tomatoes, onion, garlic and red wine. Mm it was very good haha. The bread was a little doughy because we got impatient while it was cooking, but it wasn't THAT doughy (like the first time I ever made pizza, in grade 8 in Home Ec class. MMMM raw flour.)

We also decided to splurge and put some vegan mozzarella on top. I had to buy Cheezly brand this time as my favourite little vegan store didn't have any teese mozzarella in :( we hadn't had the Cheezly mozz before (I think) and it was pretty much as nasty as we thought. It's ok cooked, but we could just eat the teese stuff! Oh well. It's also supposed to be 'super melting' but the pizza says otherwise. However, I had a toasted sandwich with copious amounts of Cheezly and some hash browns today and it melted all over the place. Maybe the pizza will need to be stuck under the grill for a little bit next time?

And holy crap it's so unbearably hot. Well obviously I'm bearing it because I'm still in the country and alive. But this morning I thought it a good idea to fix up my garden and plant more stuff, and it was a great idea until sweat starting pouring down my legs and into my eyes. I got most of what I wanted done, except sowing my mint seeds, but I can do that this afternoon when the sun goes away.

I bought two 40L bags of organic garden soil at Bunnings for $8.50 each because my soil is crap and so far I've dug one bag in. So as of this moment in my garden I have:

Herbs - basil, rosemary, thyme, parsley, lemongrass, garlic chives and regular chives, mint

Vegetables: hot chilli, sweet chilli, eggplant, tomatoes, purple carrots, purple climbing beans, butter beans, radishes, ginger.

I've put chicken wire over my beans to hopefully deter my cats from digging around in the nice new dirt they love. I am reaaallly looking forward to my carrots! I have put them in a nice deep window-box like planter box thing with potting mix with no lumps so in theory they should grow. Unless the cat digs it all up. Maybe I should chicken wire that too.

I'll take some pictures when it all starts sprouting. At the moment it's just a big black expanse of dirt with some wire and some stakes. :)



Look what you missed out on!

*dribble*

I love making my own pizza. Why don't I do it more often? I think it's because I get it in my head that the dough takes forever, but really it's ready in an hour and a half. That's not that bad. =D

I based it on a recipe from Vegan on the Cheap, and just went a bit nuts with the toppings. I really wanted mushrooms on it, but Brisbane has gone nuts and all the groceries were gone! So I had to make do with what I had. My dad and my sister were supposed to come to tea, but because of all this water dad got evacuated from work near the city and my sister was stuck further south. And damn they missed out.

The dough ingredients are: 2 3/4 cups wholemeal flour, 2 1/4 tsp instant dry yeast, 1 tsp salt and 1 cup warm water. It was a nice thick soft crust when cooked, the way I like it.

The toppings I chose in order from bottom to top:

Tomato paste

Caremelised onions (with maple syrup and balsamic vinegar)

Cooked kidney beans pureed with parsnip and garlic

Sliced tomato

Homemade basil pesto

Before cooking

When I worked at a continental delicatessen, we sold tiny little containers of caremelised onions for about $8.50. Dude. People actually BOUGHT it. It was one of our most popular condiment things. Jeez. I've never made them before but they are so easy.



So pretty

I thinly sliced a huge onion, poured a liberal amount of rice bran oil in my frying pan and cooked them for about 20 minutes on med-low. About half way through I put in a blob of maple syrup and a dash of balsamic. They are so delicious. I might make some tonight to have on a sandwich for work tomorrow.

Anyway, pizza = mmmm. Maybe we should have pizza night more often.