Best ice cream ever

Cashew nut ice cream with vanilla bean and raw cocoa nibs. We had it with fresh sliced strawberries which are perfectly ripe and in season now.

Drrooolll.

It's very expensive at $13.99 for 500mL, but we figured out there's actually 10 serves in the tub so it in theory should last us almost a week.

Apparently the person who created it has opened a little raw cafe not too far from us. We went to check it out but it was closed, so next time.

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 :)

Homemade vegan lip balm

A little while back I found a recipe for homemade vegan lip balm, and I finally had the chance to make some. This winter my lips have been really dry, and I've just left it that way because I didn't want to spend truckloads of money on a lip balm from the store. For one thing, for some reason it's incredibly hard to find vegan lip balm (almost everything used beeswax) even most of the lip balms in health food stores had beeswax, and the specifically vegan ones had a price that went through the roof! And I didn't really want to put petroleum by-products, or other weird chemicals with super long hard to pronounce names on my lips. Hum.

The recipe I used is from Healthy Vegan Homemade. It was really easy to do, quite quick (I had time to make a cup of tea while it was all melting) and the end result is fantastic.

I did make some substitutions for some of the ingredients: Hemp oil for the vitamin E oil (hemp oil is strangely, SO much cheaper to buy), avocado oil for the jojoba oil (I just could not find it). I also used peppermint oil instead of spearmint. But use whatever. I think cinnamon oil would be great! I saw it at Mrs. Flannery's which is where I found my peppermint oil (funnily enough, it was the cheapest price there).

Here is my cat (her name is Bob) sitting atop her perch of an upturned esky. Oh, and the lip balm. It sets very quickly, and rolls up and down the tube with ease :) And I get to smell peppermint everyday!

One thing - the recipe specifies to use a glass measuring cup. Pay attention to that...I melted my plastic one. DUH. So I went and bought a glass one ha.

It's bright green mainly because of the avocado oil which is bright green. The hemp oil is pretty green too. This doesn't show up on your lips :)

So, I am very happy with my first attempt at making homemade cosmetics. (This will continue. I'm trying to cut out the need for buying shampoos, face moisturisers, etc from the store.)

Wanna know how much it cost? $1.18 per average sized tube of lip balm. That's it.

3 mushroom pasta

This weekend we decided to go and visit my partner's mother :) This is what she made for dinner:

3 Mushroom Pasta
Serves 2-3

Ingredients:

Olive oil and knob of vegan margarine for frying
100g white button mushrooms, sliced
100g shiitake mushrooms, sliced
100g Oyster mushrooms, sliced
Handful each of basil, curly leaved parsley and Italian parsley (or just one kind of parsley), chopped
1birdseye chilli, finely chopped
1/2 red onion, diced
2 garlic cloves chopped
splash of white wine
Cooked pasta (we used a gluten free corn and rice twist pasta but any kind will do)

Method:

Have all mushrooms, onion, chilli, garlic and herbs sliced and ready. Heat olive oil and knob of margarine in a deep frying pan until margarine is melted. Add in garlic, onion and chilli and fry until onion is translucent.

Add mushrooms and splash of wine and stir. Leave it to cook while you chop up all the herbs finely. When the mushrooms are soft, add in herbs and cook for a few minutes.

Serve on top of cooked pasta!

This was so yummy. Each mushroom had such a distinctive flavour. I've never had shiitake or oyster mushrooms before and I now know I like them.

Creten stew (red wine, seitan, onion and orange stew)

This screamed at me to cook it the other night. I love red wine, I love tofu how could I say no? (From what the hell does a vegan eat anyway? blog)

I was going to make it in my tagine...but I exploded it. Stupid me decided to pour some cold water on it when the oil ran out for frying tofu in. Big crack, thought I was going to die. But it's okay, no shrapnel actually flew at me. Heh. I was extremely pissed off though, I shall have to buy a replacement. It was a gift that I only got to use once! SO I made it in a large stock pot with a tight fitting lid on the stove top.

I couldn't find small white pearl onions so I used brown pickling onions instead, and cut them in half because they were quite big. Ideally I'd have liked to leave them whole, but oh well. I also used tofu, because I've never seen seitan here, or vital wheat gluten to make it. Yet. I'm getting there.

As you can see from the top picture I used Yalumba Y Series Merlot to cook this with. It's a medium bodied wine which I love - but it was probabaly too strong for this dish. However, as I said - I love red wine! So to me, it was perfect. If I was to cook this for family I might use half wine/half stock.

While this was cooking, the whole house smelled of...sangria! The orange/wine combination was definately dominating. Deliciously dominating. I can't wait until spring, or just a warm day when I can make up some sangria! We bought a nice glass jug (which accidentally turned out to be made in Spain, har har) months ago specifically to make said sangria, but it got cold. :( I make a gooooood sangria. When I do make it, I'll be sure to post a recipe.

We served the stew on top of penne pasta, because that's what I have. It would be good on any shape of pasta, or some other grain. I think pasta would be best though.

Chocolate shortbread biscuits :)

The other night, not too long after eating dinner (I made another batch of Ethiopian berbere stew because it was pretty much free) Nadine and I decided to really crave dessert. Which was kind of annoying because for some reason I wanted apple pie but had no apples, and lacked the energy to make it anyway, so we decided on shortbread. Anyone can make shortbread. It's made from the 3 most basic ingredients almost everyone has in the pantry/fridge: butter, flour, sugar. Or vegan margarine in our case. I decided to chuck in some cocoa powder to make it even more of a treat.

Chocolate shortbread biscuits

Ingredients:

225g vegan margarine

3/4 cup icing sugar

1 cup cornflour

1.5 cups plain flour (wholemeal is delicious)

1/4 tsp salt

2-3 tbsp cocoa powder (optional)

Method:

Mix all ingredients together to form a soft dough. Roll out dough to about 1/2 inch thick and cut into squares or whatever shape you desire. I sometimes use star cutters. Prick with a fork. Bake for 30-40 minutes at 150 degrees C (or 300 degrees F). Let cool a bit before serving. (They really do taste better this way!)

Ours could have baked for another 5 minutes or so, but we couldn't be bothered and they firmed up very nicely in the fridge overnight. (We have to keep stuff in the fridge in this climate because mould forms almost instantly on fresh baked goods. I once lost half a batch of muffins that I tried to serve for dessert once :( )

Cornflour makes for lighter shortbread, icing sugar ditto. Roll it out thinner for a 'shorter' biscuit. The best ones I ever made were nice and crumbly.

You're also supposed to cream the butter and sugar together first, but this time I forgot because it wasn't written down on the page in front of me. My way worked nicely though :) I just made it like pastry, but sort of smooshed everything together by hand instead of rubbing in the margarine.

I've never made chooclate shortbread before, and these kind of turned out like little soft brownies. Yum :)

Even better than the real thing - 'ricotta' + spinach stuffed pasta shells

We suddenly have kitchen cupboards and jars overflowing with various shaped pasta...which is good because I'll never need to buy pasta again, and it's all fancy brands haha. For about a week Nadine was bringing home packets that had holes in them etc, can't be sold but can still be eaten! One of the shapes were these giant shells, perfect for stuffing. So I followed a recipe from Skinny Bitch in the Kitch for vegan stuffed shells. Fantabulous. The 'ricotta' is literally just firm tofu, olive oil, oregano and garlic whizzed in a blender until smooth. It literally tastes like and has the same texture as the real thing - only difference was that it didn't give me a stomach ache as soon as I ate some.

I know it's pretty much just a recreation of the only option a lot of restaurants (particularly pubs) offer vegetarians, but you know, sometimes you just want squishy cheese and spinach stuffed pasta. This is just a tastier and healthier version of it. Good to give to omnivorous family and friends. You can't even tell the difference. I'll be using this ricotta recipe for my homemade ravioli next time I decide to pull out the machine. I don't why I haven't before :)

I have been juicing up a storm since I got my juicer last week. I've got all sorts of vegetables in the fridge to use (I read somewhere that if you have too much of one thing too often you can actually become allergic to it - wouldn't it be tragic if I was allergic to carrots?) from carrots to fennel. I found a delicious sounding recipe with celery, fennel and cucumber juiced together. I know you are supposed to avoid mixing (according to a fresh fruit and veg guide to women's health I picked up in the fruit shop), but I don't know if I could do straight fennel. I'm not really the biggest licorice fan - then again, I've never eaten fennel in my life so who knows, I might love it.

Anyway this juice is beetroot, carrot and celery. (Root vegetables are ok together). I think this is my favourite combination so far, I just love beetroot juice. The carrot and the celery seem to take away the 'earthy' taste that people (Nadine) don't seem to like about raw beetroot.

Recipe:

1/2 large beetroot, peeled and cut to fit in juicer

3 med/large carrots

1 large stick celery

Juice each vegetable. Mix together. Drink :) Makes enough for one.

This morning I decided to adapt a recipe I found in Karma Cookbook 'Agar Agar Drink'. It's supposed to help relieve constipation, and let me tell you, it works. The original recipe called for 600ml sugar free organic apple juice, but I can't afford to buy that and I can't stand the regular kind you get in the supermarket. Way too sweet. So I juiced two large fresh granny smith apples with my juicer - this made about 250ml, and then I diluted it with 50ml of water. I made half the recipe.

Note: nothing compares to the deliciousness of freshly squeezed apple juice. Nothing.

Ingredients:

300ml apple juice

pinch of salt

1 tsp agar agar flakes

Pour into a saucepan and bring to the boil. Simmer for ten minutes. Drink hot.

Now, I forgot to read the whole thing so I didn't simmer it for ten minutes and therefore my agar agar wasn't quite fully dissolved. But I just ate it with a spoon when I got to the end :) This was so delicious. It took a few minutes to get used to hot apple juice, but it tasted kind of like apple pie without the spices.

With the vegetable pulp left in the juicer at the end I made these burger patties. I can't remember what exactly I put in them (I really should have written it down) but next time I make them I will. I hate wastage. Other things I could do with the pulp could be adding it to pasta sauces or stir frys, or muffins. I've read somewhere that the pulp is tasteless because all the taste and nutrients come out with the juice, but I think because my juicer is old and second hand it doesn't quite get all the juice it could out so the pulp is still quite tasteful. Obviously not as much as if the vegetable was whole, but doesn't taste of cardboard. So I may as well use it :)