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. 

Nadine's birthday food :)

I decided to make a recipe from The Complete Vegetarian Barbecue Book by Susan Geiskopf-Hadler. However, I forgot to buy mushrooms! So I used eggplant instead. And regular white potatoes because there weren't any red potatoes at the farmer's market on Sunday. (The recipe was 'Red Potato and Mushroom Skewers' by the way.)

So I cooked up some pasta (I was hungover and bought like 6 packets of different kinds of pasta for $1 each!) with some homemade basil pesto . This time I used my own homegrown basil and parsley as they are going nuts in this heat right now, and I also used pine nuts as we had some from a recipe we made ages ago. Then I mixed the pesto through the pasta with a little bit of the cooking water and topped with skewers that had the potato, eggplant and some kohl rabi on it. I had marinated the eggplant in some red wine vinegar and soy sauce for about 10 minutes before I made them. The eggplant soaked it up straight away.

The whole combination was rather delicious :)

And of course I had to make a birthday cake! This is a red velvet cake dyed with beetroot pulp and juice, with vegan cream cheese icing. I made a red velvet cake because the last time I attempted one (also Nadine's birthday) I didn't own an electric blender and it turned out an utter failure (I made 4 cakes stirred with a fork! Long story.). And tasted of food colouring. People at the party demolished it though! Ah, alcohol.

The picture came out way darker than it actually is! The cake was really a deep red/purple colour. Our cocoa powder also seems really dark so I used half the amount the recipe called for but it didn't seem to make a difference.

Anyhow it was still a rather good cake (and I really hate chocolate cake). I was going to cut the cake in half and put icing in the middle but the whole thing deflated to about half it's size! I am not sure why. Maybe because the recipe was for muffins. I just doubled it and stuck in a cake tin and baked it for ages. :)

I used this recipe from BitterSweet blog. The icing is just a basic cream cheese icing (¼ cup vegan cream cheese, ¼ cup vegan margarine, 2 cups icing sugar). Delicious but so sweet. I apologise to my teeth. I made double that because I thought I was going to ice the middle, so now we have leftover icing in the fridge. We almost managed a whole piece! Nadine liked it which is the main thing! Don't get me wrong I liked it too, but I'm not going to rush to make another one :)

 We ate it with this coffee substitute my step mum Margaret got us on to. Well she has Caro at home but this stuff was half the price for twice as much and had the same ingredients. It tastes a bit like coffee to me. I really like it, it's something a little bit different.

Minestrone with pesto

Minestrone :)

Minestrone
Serves at least 6

Ingredients:

1/2 cup of brown/green lentils, soaked for an hour or so in hot water
2.5 cups 'chicken' stock
1 cup red wine
oil for frying (Can use water)
1 large onion, chopped
1 med eggplant, cubed (I don't peel mine but you can if you want)
1 med carrot, chopped
1 big stalk of celery sliced
3 cloves garlic, chopped
800mL cooked tomatoes (about 2x400g cans or 1x800g can)
3 med potatoes, skin on, cubed smallish
1 med zucchini, chopped
handful fresh green beans, sliced
1/2 cup sprial pasta, or other small shape
Basil pesto for garnish

Method:

Fry onion, eggplant, carrot and celery in oil until starting to soften. Add garlic and stir. Add stock, wine, tomatoes, lentils (without soaking water - you can use this to make the stock) and simmer for about 20 minutes.

Put in potatoes, zucchini, pasta and green beans. (I added an extra cup of water here because the liquid had simmered down a bit). Turn heat back up and gently boil for about 15 minutes, or until potatoes, pasta and lentils are cooked. They should be by now!

Serve in bowls with a spoonful of pesto on top to stir in. Add as much as you like - we had quite large dollops. It was delicious!

The wine seems like a bit much at first, but by the end of the cooking time it had mellowed out quite a bit.

This would be good for omnivourous friends/family :) If I were giving it to my family I'd probably replace the eggplant with extra pasta or lentils, or just leave it out, and chop the celery up really tiny. But everybody has different tastes!

Mmmm basil pesto...

I've never made pesto before. When I was vegetarian and just moved out of home, I literally lived off jars of Coles Homebrand basil pesto on angelhair pasta. If I splurged and bought fancy pesto I bought 60c homebrand spaghetti!

I made this specifically for an ingredient in dinner tonight. I got a nice big bunch of basil from the farmers market this morning (I'd have taken a picture but I put it in the coldest part of the fridge, unwrapped - mistake, don't ever do that. A couple of hours later when I got it out of the fridge to make the pesto it had started to turn black and go a bit goopy! Oh well, it's still good...just not photo quality.  I'd have made it out of my own homegrown basil but it really sucks at the moment. One little plant is powering on but the others are giving up on life. No sun! Dammit. I will be moving my pots to a sunny spot soon - hopefully no one moves/steals/knocks them over.

Anyway - to the pesto. I based it off a recipe in Vegan Italiano by Donna Klein. I love this book.

Basic basil pesto

Makes almost 2/3 cup

2 1/2 cups loosely packed fresh basil

3 tbsp almonds

3 garlic cloves, chopped

Few sprigs of parsley (I used curly-leaved, but Italian flat leaved would probably be better)

Few stems of garlic chives (my parsley isn't doing fantastically either)

1/4 cup rice bran oil

Put everything but the oil into a food processor and blend. Add the oil and blend until smooth :)

This was pretty good for a first attempt! I can't afford olive oil - I assume it would be much better to use than rice bran. Next time I might add a cup of spinach to it :) I can afford pine nuts even less. But I thought almonds were nice here :) It's not like you can really taste the nuts anyway.

We decided to have some on spaghetti for lunch. We can't resist pesto when we have it!

I fully intend on growing heaps of basil this summer so I can make big batches of it and freeze it into little individual portions to enjoy through winter :)