Fettucine with Zucchini, lemon, tofu and almonds.

I borrowed this recipe from a lovely book my mum got me for Christmas (Stephanie Alexander's Kitchen Garden Companion). The original recipe is called 'Fettucine with Zucchini, Lemon, Ricotta and Fried Almonds' on page 716. I've just edited it to suit our vegan lifestyle :) Most recipes in the book are vegetarian, which is nice.

Ingredients:

Your choice of vegan margarine (I use Nuttelex Lite)

1/3 cup flaked almonds

Fettucine pasta (I used spinach)

2 large zucchini, diced

3 cloves garlic, thinly sliced

1 cup chicken style stock (I use Massel)

Juice and zest of one lemon

1/2 block of tofu, diced really tiny

2 tbsp chopped fresh parsley

Method:

Put pasta on to cook.

Fry the tofu until crispy in some margarine. Remove from pan and  drain on paper towel. Using the same pan (you may need to put more margarine in) lightly fry the almonds until light brown. (I burnt mine by accident but it was still good). Remove from pan and drain with tofu.

Put the rest of the ingredients except the parsley and half of the lemon zest into the pan. Bring to a simmer and let cook until pasta is ready, or until zucchini is tender. Stir in the tofu, almonds, parsley and remaining lemon zest and heat for a minute before serving.

This is a light and summery meal that qould have been perfect to eat outside with candles or something. However, it is STILL raining, and we don't have anywhere to eat outside anyway :)

Obviously the tofu cubes replace the ricotta cheese. I was going to go all out and make up an actual tofu ricotta (I always use the recipe from Skinny Bitch) but I couldn't be bothered getting out my blender. It would be fantastic with it though :)

It's been over a month since my last post!

Oh no, I appear to have forgotten I have a blog to update!

Haha, actually I've been busy settling in to my new job to really cook anything truly exciting. I've been cooking up big pots of curries and pasta and eating it for days, and it's mostly been all re runs. However, everything is all good now so I'll be able to cook nice things on the weekends and post :) Hooray.

For now I'll post about our Christmas food, and afterwards get back into it.

First up. On Christmas Eve we went and celebrated with my girlfriend's mum (she had to work on Christmas day). She likes to cook up a spread (even though there's usually only two or three people eating!). I contributed Beetloaf and she made various other bits including: Roasted potato, sweet potato and pumpkin, Roasted beetroot cubes with parsley and olive oil, pea and zucchini salad with spinach leaves and a garlic and olive oil dressing, cos leaf salad with fresh tomato and basil pesto dressing.

Yum.

And of course we had dessert! Strawberries and mulberries soaked in balsamic vinegar, a chocolate fruit cake, raw vegan cashew ice cream and some vegan meringues. (I may review these later). The berries particularly were to die for.

On Christmas day we trekked to my mum's house for breakfast. Everyone usually eats bacon and eggs and hasbrowns, so we just took some tofu to make scramble and some Sanitarium BBQ sausages to have while others ate their dead pig :) Also on the menu were barbecued hash browns, tomatoes and mushrooms. (Except they cooked the mushies with butter so I rescued the stems and put them in our scramble).

We saw a little frog in mum's pool (which I really wanted to swim in but it was freezing cold and raining, big surprise) and it couldn't get out so my sister rescued it and put it on a nice wet rock.

And finally, after hanging out at mum's for a while we drove up to dad's house for Christmas dinner! It was yummy Sanitarium vegie roast which we pretty much only ever eat at Christmas time so it's a bit of a treat, with roasted parsnip, carrot and potato, and steamed peas, brocolli and cauliflower and a shredded salad.

I didn't take a picture of my dessert because it looked like vomit! (Don't worry, I made it so I can say that).

This is it before we demolished it - vegan trifle! I don't really have a recipe. I use the sponge cake recipe from Easy Vegan Cooking by Leah Leneman, whatever brand of vegan jelly crystal packet the local health food stores are selling at the time, canned peaches in juice and I follow the recipe for custard on the custard powder packet except I use soy milk (and this time I used half soy and half coconut milk). Then layer as follows: sponge, peaches, custard, jelly - until you get to the top or run out of ingredients. Top with cream! (I made whipped coconut cream. Just refridgerate two cans of full fat coconut cream over night. In the morning carefully open each can and scoop out the cream part on top (it separates) add sugar and vanilla to taste and beat and beat til thick. I added a tablespoon or so of coconut oil so it remained solid in the fridge. Worked a treat and was divinely rich!)

We also had some chocolate crackles that my step mum made :) Mmmm. You can find that recipe on the side of any rice bubbles packet!

So Christmas was a success I think! Now to lay off the sugar and get back to being healthy.

School's over!

As the title implies, I finished my last class at tafe today! Hooray! Now I have a Certificate 3 in Horticulture (assuming it gets sent to me in the mail) which is very exciting. It means I'm qualified...for stuff. Hmm. It was quite an anti climactic end to the semester. We don't get a 'graduation' or anything. Oh well - I passed and that is all that matters. What am I supposed to do now? There's nothing to procrastinate for! Relax, I suppose.
I do have a job - I've left the fruit shop and got a job at a large production nursery up north a little ways. It's not particularly exciting (I'm a nursery hand on the maintenance team - weeding, pruning, you name it) but I really like it. It's hard labourious work usually in the full sun, but I enjoy a challenge. Never drunk so much water in my life. At the moment I'm doing 2 days per week but I'm almost 100% sure I'll be full time after the little holiday we are going to take. I should find out the major details of that tomorrow :)

Anyway enough of the boring stuff.

My sage is starting to look lovely! Almost as soon as I potted it when I bought it it pretty much died. It just shrivelled away and now it's just suddenly exploded with lovely leaves which smell and taste amazing.

My tomatoes have all got little tomatoes hanging off them now. Some even have 2 or 3! I'm very excited for a tomato. It's been windy lately but none have toppled over yet. Though today I will stake them I think, just in case the wind gets worse. I don't want to lose them before I get to eat them!

Nadine cooked the other night and made this amazing 'Peanutty Pumpkin Stew' from Vegan on the Cheap by Robin Robertson. This book wins the prize for being the most used recently! This stew was so good. So so good. She made it with black quinoa as a base but we had leftovers another night and I cooked up some millet grain as the base instead for something different. Both went equally as well with it. It's basically this very spicy satay-y delicious mess of vegetables and chickpeas. Yum. 

I also made a yummy dessert recently but I'll put it in a separate post because otherwise there will be too much on this one. :)

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.

Custard tarts!!

Oh my god these are amazing. We ate them all in about 2 days flat.

OM NOM NOM. They held together fantabulously.

I happened across the recipe at Heathen Vegan. Oh yum.

I accidentally made twice the amount of custard (I measured up a pint of each milk rather than 1/2!) so I got a couple of extra tarts, and ate a crap load of custard. Mmm. I'll be making these again and again.

'Vegan on the Cheap'

Bought myself a new cookbook because I felt like it! Vegan on the Cheap by Robin Robertson. It's a great book! It's full of heaps of awesome tips about living cheaply but well. It's very handy :)

Tonight was Nadine's turn to cook so she decided to make 'Dan Dan-Style Linguine' on page 124. Basically a spicy peanut and tahini sauce with mixed veg and crumbled tofu on pasta. Delicious :) Very simple and very filling.

Last night was my turn and I chose something with chickpeas because I'd just cooked up a whole heap. I picked Moroccan Chickpeas and Couscous. I had every ingredient I needed except a can of tomatoes and raisins, but they only set me back about $2. I'm pretty sure I'll be making this, often. Very yummy :)

So the book was a good investment I reckon.

I also splurged on a soy milk maker! I am honestly sick of buying carton after carton at the supermarket (we buy at least 4 a week) and then just chucking the damn thing out. As much as we love our Sanitarium So Good Lite, I love the trees the cartons are made from more.

So today I trialled a batch :) I bought 2 glass bottles from the supermarker to store it all in, in the fridge. Mmm...it was OK. It smelled good, which is a good start. It tastes just fine which is also great. It's a little bit watery but that is easily fixed in the next batch.  However it had a bit of pulp in it, which we could get used to but I'd rather just not have it there.

Trial and error! I am very excited to try to make rice milk. I used to buy it when I went off soy milk for a while, but the commercial brand all have SO MUCH sugar in it (and some even seem to have corn syrup) so I refuse to buy it. But if I make my own plain rice milk, it'll be just fine.

The only thing is, our Santiarium stuff was fortified with B12 and calcium - so we're going to have to up the ante on other aspects of our diet to incorporate it. Lots of brocolli, I think. We haven't eaten that for a while. :)

I made a couple of recipes from the PPK :)

I stumbled upon this recipe for 'Chesapeake Tempeh Cakes' on the Post Punk Kitchen blog and had to try it. I'm always on the look out for ways to eat tempeh that isn't disgusting. This is definately one of them.

Look how disgusting tempeh looks! It's like congealed set vomit with lumpy bits, and not cooked properly that's kinda what it tastes like. This one was actually the cheapest one in the store - I got it at $4.75 for 125g. I chose it because it had chilli bits in it as you can see, and I thought that'd probably make it taste better again. Another thing wrong with tempeh is that it's so damn expensive. Last time I used a tofu-tempeh mixed block which was a good stepping stone (and cheaper at about the same price for twice as much), this time we were ready for the real stuff.

Man these cake things were good. As you can see from the top picture I served it with steamed mixed veges (carrot, home grown beans, farmer's market white radish, a very sweet yellow squash and some asparagus) and some steamed-then-grilled potatoes. Oh, and a chunk of extremely delicious organic avocado I couldn't resist picking up at the same store I got the tempeh from.

The little patties were very easy to form (I think they would make a good burger pattie or sausage if rolled into the right shape). I made mine smaller than the recipe did because I made 14 instead of 10. We had enough to eat for lunch today :) I also made heaps of the veges and reheated them today as well.

Yum. Pretty sure that I'll be using this recipe quite a bit as I start to be able to afford tempeh a little more often :)

This is another thing I made from the Post Punk Kitchen blog - Chickpea Picatta. It's a very simple dish of chickpeas (duh), garlic, onion, capers and white wine. I was so excited at finding a recipe with chickpeas that WASN'T a curry that I couldn't wait to make it and it didn't dissapoint. Though the greens I chose to serve it on (I bought some chicory at the farmer's market as I'd never had it before) were a little too bitter for the dish it was still really delicious overall. Nadine didn't mind the bitter though. I also decided to serve it on mashed potatoes as the recipe suggests - but since I don't like mashed potatoes I mashed in a parsnip with it, and it worked.

Unless you can find a really cheap vegan white wine to use in this recipe, it's not THAT cheap to make (well, compared to other recipes I make) but we just drank the rest of the bottle with dinner so there was no wastage! Well I had beer, someone else finished all the wine ;)

I cooked up a massive batch of chickpeas (they take so damn LONG) and have frozen the rest to use later. I'm using some tonight as a matter of fact, in a recipe from a cookbook I just bought myself, I am very excited about trying a recipe.