Sometimes it's nice..

..not to have to cook!

Nadine's had a few days off so tonight she cooked tea so I could sit on my arse. She told me to pick a random number and the Fusilli Roasted Veggie Primavera from Appetite for Reduction was my choice. Vegetables are cheap at the moment - apparently the cherry tomatoes were reduced to clear, woot!

It's nice to have a giant plate of vegetables sometimes. Colllooouuursssss. I've been sick lately so I reckon as many veg as possible is the best thing to do. :)

Another purple risotto!

Rainbow Risotto

Serves 4

Ingredients:

1 cup arborio rice

1/2 cup vodka

about 5 cups stock, mixed up with 2 bay leaves and a teaspoon of dried basil left to simmer on stove

1 carrot, chopped

1 zucchini, chopped

1/2 red capsicum, chopped

1/2 cup frozen corn kernels

1/2 cup frozen peas

5-6 cloves garlic, chopped

Almost a whole 1/2 red cabbage

Sprinkle of nutritional yeast

1 tsp vegan margarine

Balsamic vinegar and lemon juice to serve

Method:

Fry all vegetables except the cabbage in a little bit of oil until just starting to soften. Put in the arborio rice and stir until slightly translucent. Add the vodka, stirring until it's all absorbed. Then continue to add stock until rice is almost cooked. Stir in the cabbage and some more stock and let cook until cabbage is slightly wilted and stock absorbed. If needed continue adding stock until rice is tender.

When done, stir through the vegan margarine and the nutritional yeast.

Serve on a plate with a squeeze of lemon juice and some balsamic vinegar if you like!

This is a great way to use up the last little bits of vegetables in the fridge, but you don't want to make a stir fry. This tasted really fresh and summery. Make it with whatever you have on hand!

For dessert we had this:

Also made to get rid of excess crap in the fridge/freezer. We had one lonely sheet of puff pastry left that was taking up too much room and a little bit of leftover strawberry sauce I made a while ago. I bought a tin of apricots yesterday - they were discounted to $1.50. I put them in the pastry, folded it over into a triangle and brushed it with melted vegan margarine. I even sprinkled sugar on top! (Well I actually use powdered dextrose instead of sugar but it's essentially the same thing. You buy it in the home brew section for about $3 a kilo. It's packed with carbohydrate glucose energy but doesn't have the bad-for-you part of sugar in it...or something like that. Don't quote me.) Anyway, I baked it and served it with strawberry sauce.

I am never making it again! It was delicious but waaayyyy too sweet for my belly. I feel sick now! I much prefer sweet pastries to be shortcrust...it was still good though :)

Roast Pumpkin and White Bean Vegetable soup

This is the delicious pumpkin I bought the other day! I've never seen a pumpkin so orange. It smelled really good too. I'm going to be so sick of pumpkin by the end of it. Haha so worth it.

Roast Pumpkin and White Bean Vegetable Soup
4 small serves
Ingredients:

¼ medium sized organic pumpkin
1 med-large onion
1 small head garlic
1-2 tbsp rice bran oil
½ tsp dried oregano
½ cup uncooked navy beans (soaked overnight in cold water, or quick boiled and soaked for 1 hour)
½ red capsicum
½ small head brocolli
½ small head cauliflower
2 yellow squash
500ml ‘chicken’ stock (or vegetable broth, or water)
½ tsp chilli powder
½ tsp ground sage
freshly ground black pepper

Method:

Cook beans. Leave in the water until they are required.

Cut pumpkin into equal sized chunks. Leave the skin on if you want, I did. Put the chunks into a bowl with the oil and oregano. Toss until well coated. Arrange chunks on a baking tray. Put whole garlic (I took some skin off and trimmed the top) and whole peeled and trimmed onion in leftover oil in bowl and coat. Wrap them in tin foil and put on the tray with pumpkin. Roast at 180 degrees C (350 F) for one hour.

Once cooked, let cool for a little while and then put it all in a food processor (minus the skins). Blend until smooth and transfer it to a large saucepan.

Chop the capsicum, brocolli, cauliflower and squash into small chunks. Blend until mostly smooth and add to pumpkin mix in saucepan.

Make 500ml chicken stock out of the bean’s cooking water (no waste!) and put the beans in with the pumpkin. Add spices and turn element to medium heat. Add enough stock to get the consistency you want. I used pretty much all 500ml and it was pasta-sauce thick.

Serve with garlic bread!

This soup was quite sweet but so yummy. I'm thinking next time I make it I may roast all the vegetables. The extra veg was sort of an after thought when I looked in the fridge and saw it was about to go bad. I managed to get the seasoning perfect first time and you can pretty much taste each individual vegetable without it being too much. Tomorrow lunch we are going to have leftovers as a pasta sauce. Very excited :)

Masaman curry

I made this last week to have before we went out with a friend to the little bar up the road, where we drank entirely too much wine (and thus spent entirely too much money on food the next few days - I just found a reciept from Mrs Flannery's and on it is $9 worth of vege chips! I obviously can't read price tickets when I am hung over.)

Anyway it's totally delicious and quite mild compared to other curries I make. My mum makes a killer version of this (but with chicken so I don't eat it any more). I think she may even use the same brand of curry paste as I do. The only thing that would have made this better is chopped peanuts or cashew nuts. However since I spent hideous amounts of money this week I'll have to go without nuts for a few more. Haha.

Emma’s version of masaman curry
Serves about 8

Ingredients:

1 med onion, sliced
1 long red chilli, sliced
½ a green, red or yellow capsicum, sliced
3 cloves garlic, chopped
1 med-large eggplant, cubed
1 med carrot, diced
about ¼ head of brocolli, chopped
about ¼ head of cauliflower, chopped
1 med zucchini, diced
handful white button mushrooms, diced
1 can chickpeas, drained
1 can baby corn, drained
tin masaman curry paste
1 400mL can lite coconut milk
1 400mL can lite coconut cream
Cooked rice

Method:

1. Have all vegetables chopped and ready in the beginning. It’s easier!

2. Lightly fry onion, capsicum, chilli and garlic until slightly softened. I use a little bit of water usually but you can use oil if you like.

3. Add eggplant. A few minutes later add tin of curry paste. Stir to combine.

4. Let cook for a few minutes (don’t burn it) and then add can of coconut cream, stir.

5. Add in can chickpeas and tin corn.

6. After 5-10 minutes add in the rest of the chopped vegetables minus the zucchini and mushroom. Add the can of coconut milk here. Stir it, and then let it simmer (I usually put my rice on about now). When the rice is almost ready (about 20 minutes later) stir in the zucchini and mushroom. Leave this to simmer until rice is cooked.

7. Serve curry on top of rice and enjoy!

This can of course be frozen, you can add or subtract any vegetables you like. I think a traditional masaman curry uses potato. I only have sweet potato so I opted against it. This is by far not a traditional masaman. When I make curry I like to use as many different coloured vegetables as possible. I also usually put tofu in it but we had omnivorous company for tea and I don’t know how they feel about the magical little white blocks!

I bought some thai red rice a few weeks ago at a Chinatown supermarket. Apparently it has the same sort of nutritional value as brown rice. It tastes similar but has more of a bite to it. I cook it in the same way as I cook brown rice (one part rice, two parts water - bring to boil turn down and simmer for 30 mins) but red rice is supposed to take only 15 minutes. I reckon it takes more like 20. It's nice - but I don't think I'll go out of my way to buy it again. I prefer the brown rice tetxture :) Next type of rice I'll buy from there will be the black/wild rice. There's a black rice pudding I want to make.

We will be eating this curry for days :)

Pot pie

I bough a whole butternut pumpkin the other day (it's only a small one) because they were 99c a kilogram. And since my pumpkin plants were eaten alive by powdery mildew, I figured I'd start buying them again. So I had to find a recipe! I also have 3kg of potatoes ($2 a bag!) so I wanted one that had both. So I decided to cook this:

Celebration Pot Pie with Pumpkin from fatfree vegan kitchen. I know I make a lot of stuff from there, but most of it so far has been delicious, easy to make with basic ingredients, and there's just so much on the one page :)

The only problem I had with this recipe was the amount of sodium! Holy crap 986.1mg sodium per serving! According to this website (I just ran a search on google.com) the RDI of sodium is 920 to 2300mg per day. I suppose for all your other meals and snacks of the day you could just not have salt, but salt is in pretty much everything.

So I think I cut the salt about in half by skipping a few things I just didn't have, and not adding the actual salt in the recipe in.

It was quite tasty, in the way stews are (meaning a little bit bland) so I just dripped some hot chilli sauce on top. It could go with a bit more garlic (maybe incorporate more into the biscuits).

I also didn't have any seitan (I've never used/made it before) as I have no idea where to find vital wheat gluten. Maybe health food stores like Mrs. Flannery's, but generally places like that are regular haunts for me and I haven't come across it yet. Not that I've looked :) But I do on occasion buy fake meat products like Lamyong TVP Chunks which is what I put in this. The texture is a little odd (I wouldn't recommend feeding it to an omnivorous friend or relative) but as a vegan expecting strange texture they are perfectly fine. I've also tried the Beef strips by lamyong too and they are probably better than the chunks, but really do NOT freeze well. I had them in a stir fry and they were fine but I froze the leftovers and had it the next day and I couldn't chew through them. So avoid freezing :) This TVP stuff is quite expensive ($4-$6 or thereabouts a packet) but I buy it rarely so I think that's fine. They tend to last a while because I use them in conjunction with tofu and other veges, so I can get 10 servings out of a packet meant for 4, for example.

My 'biscuits' (more like cakes) didn't really turn out how they were meant to but they were fine to me anyway. They were quite crispy on the outside and soft and cakey on the inside.