Working with leftovers

Our old camera finally chucked in the towel, and I lost the charger for my new camera, so I haven't been able to take any pictures of any of the yummy stuff I've been making lately. I can barely remember what we had for tea last night. I am waiting for a new charger to come in the mail (it better be the right one darnit!) so until then I'm digging through stuff I haven't posted yet.

Last week sometime (or maybe the week before) I made up some mushroom stroganoff (recipe here) but couldn't bear just reheating it and eating it again. So I cooked up some bowtie pasta, mixed it through with some nutritional yeast and baked it in the oven for about 25 minutes. Two serves kind of turned into four, but we ate it all anyway. Everything is better baked in the oven.

Anyway, some things I have made but couldn't take pictures of that I'm very disappointed about:

This delicious Gluten Free Pumpkin pie - minus the praline because I'm lazy. It's so good. We're still getting through it so maybe I'll get a picture of it's amazingness soon.

Caramel slice - yes I bought a tin of condensed soy caramel purely to make this, and thankfully my stepmum was holding a morning tea for breast cancer research and asked me to bake something...so we only ate one piece instead of the whole pan! So good. I used lindt 70% dark choclate for the top.

And lastly, the frosted grapefruit icebox cookies from Vegan Cookies Invade your Cookie Jar (also for Margaret's morning tea). I will probabaly make these again. They are so different but so yummy. Remember to soften your copha enough, and yours will end up even better than mine!

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!?