Tom Yum Soup

Not from a jar!

I have a massive lemongrass that I really need to use before it dies back, so I finally learnt how to harvest the stems without killing it. It's very easy, reach in and twist!

Of course I had to find something to cook with it, and the first thing I thought of was a classic Tom Yum Soup. I almost always order this at a Thai restaurant if they have a vege option, and most seem to nowadays.

I went to a different fruit shop than I usually do on the way home from work one day and found a packet of Kaffir Lime Leaves for only $1.50! (You can freeze these to use later). Lemongrass and kaffir lime leaves - two main ingredients of a tom yum.

Tom Yum Soup

Serves 4 as a large starter (or add some noodles for a main)

Ingredients

6 cups chicken style stock

2 stalks lemongrass, minced, and reserve the hard inedible part (here is a handy how to)*

3 kaffir lime leaves

2 hot red chillies (such as birdseye) minced

4 cloves garlic, minced

1x1 inch ginger, sliced into match sticks

1 cup brocolli, chopped

1 carrot, sliced into half moons

1 zucchini, sliced into half moons

2 tomatoes

1 block of tofu, cubed (I used some seitan I had in the freezer)

4 tbsp soy sauce

1 tbsp fresh lime juice

1/2 cup fresh basil

Method

In a large pot, bring stock, minced lemongrass, lemongrass stalks, kaffir lime leaves, chillies, garlic and ginger to a boil. Boil for about 10 minutes then add brocolli, carrot, zucchini, tomatoes and tofu/seitan to the pot. Simmer until vegetables are tender.

Just before you are ready to serve, stir in the soy sauce, lime juice and basil.

Eat!

*I sliced mine up thinly then put it all into my mortar and pestle and ground it up almost into a paste. A food processor would also work. You could do the lemongrass, garlic and chilli all at once if you like.

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This was so good. Restaurant quality! I reckon I probably won't buy the jarred paste again :) We had it with a side of rice noodles and peanut butter.

One day if I'm rich I might buy a packet of those weird vegan prawns you can get at Asian food stores. I saw some once and they were like $15!! (I've had vegan calamari before at a restaurant - amazing. And I know calamari.)

Apparently lemongrass is freezeable. So I think I'm going to harvest most of what I have (about a million stalks) and divide the rest and replant it for next summer. I'll either freeze them as whole stalks or process the whole lot and freeze in tablespoon sized amounts like I usually do with tomato paste :)

Fruit of the Month - Avocado!

Just in time for the end of March (already? dude) - the humble avocado!

I love love love avocado. Unfortunately they are generally expensive, but ocassionally you get quite good specials. These were $1.99 at my local fruit shop, but I've been buying them lately for up to $3.

Avocadoes are soft, creamy and very tasty. (To me. My dad reckons they taste of soap.) You can eat them as is, spread on toast, as guacamole, on pizza, on top of tacos, anything!

I've been trying to eat more fats like avocado to try and help the skin on my hands get better (may be too much info, but I have contact dermatitis all over my hands that will not go away. I've tried almost everything, except food, funnily enough!) This link has some nutritional info. Of course it is an official avocado website so it may be biased on the avocado's wonderfulness but I pretty much agree.

Some cherry tomatoes to add some colour would be awesome.

Tonight we made this 15 minute Creamy Avocado Pasta from Oh She Glows. It's literally just avocado, lemon juice, pepper and garlic. Yum. And it was so good. A very easy way to incorporate more avocado into my diet. I hope it makes a difference, alongside everything else I'm doing.

(The pasta dish cost 80c per serve for me to make, by the way).

I love council pickup

Look at what I found!

I can't believe it I am so excited!

In Brisbane once a year the council does this 'council pickup' thing where people can put any of their old crap on the street (from fridges to old beds to mattresses to cardboard boxes) and the council will come and pick it up and dispose of it. This year they are encouraging the public to go round and get stuff they think they can recycle which is brilliant. (Apparently in past years we weren't supposed to...oops. Last year I found a Wedgwood teapot in perfect condition).

I collect teapots and tea sets.

ANYWAY! The bike! I bought a mauve coloured vintage traveller bike a while ago on eBay for a fair chunk of change. I love it. It's worth every penny. I've been wanting to get Nadine a bike too so we can go on some of the nice bikeways Brisbane has to offer (riding by myself is a bit boring, unless I'm going somewhere specific). But we've been so broke lately so it just wasn't an option for a while!

And today after work I went for a quick walk and saw this beauty (the maroon one).

It's in tip top condition, brakes work, gears look fine, it needs new inner tubes and tires. But the paint isn't even scratched, there is no rust that I could find in my quick inspection, the seat is untainted AND it's the perfect size for Nadine!

And it was free!

This totally made my week. Thank you people who can't be bothered selling such a gem for lots of money.

Gardener's Pie

I really felt like lentils because I haven't had them for ages. I've been using up my millions of packets of split peas first. (I've only got 1kg left! haha. I couldn't walk past 500g packs of split peas for 50c without buying at least 10 of them). I thought about using the split peas in this meal but decided it wouldn't quite work for me.

Gardener's Pie

Serves 6

Ingredients

250g green/brown lentils

2 carrots, diced

1 large zucchini, diced

100g mushrooms, thickly sliced

1 onion finely chopped

4 cloves garlic finely chopped

1 tbsp mixed Italian herbs

400g can chopped tomatoes*

750ml chicken style stock

The greens from one bunch of beetroot, well washed and roughly chopped**

1kg potatoes, washed and cooked and made into mash. We make ours with a little soy milk, nutritional yeast, margarine and pepper.

Pretty pretty

Method

Prepare mashed potatoes. Set aside.

In a large stock pot, saute the onion and garlic until it begins to soften. You can do this in oil or water - I used coconut oil. Add the carrots, lentils, stock, herbs and can tomatoes. Bring to a boil then turn down to a simmer and cook until lentils are soft/edible. It may run out of water, so keep an eye on it. Just add more, 1/2 cup at a time if this happens.

Stir in the mushrooms, zucchini and beetroot greens. Cook until mushrooms have softened and greens have wilted.

Pour into a casserole/lasagne dish and spread potatoes on top. Sprinkle with herbs, nutritional yeast or pepper if desired.

Turn oven to 180 degrees Celcius and bake for 1/2 an hour or until potatoes are crispy on the top!

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*ALDI sells cans of organic chopped tomatoes for $1.29! Or non-organic ones for 69c (at the moment). I was pretty excited, I bought 3 cans.

** Spinach, silverbeet, kale or any other kind of leafy green can be substituted for this. Even frozen spinach (just add to the pot earlier, or defrost first). I just had beetroot greens on hand. Speaking of beetroot I should really use those before they go soft.

          

This is an excellent meal to cook up when broke or in need of something hearty, filling and comforting, and you can't be bothered cooking rice. It reheats well and could be frozen to have another time. You could use whatever veges you have on hand - I had mushrooms to use up but I probably wouldn't go buy them specifically for this, for example. Celery would be a good addition. Frtozen peas or beans would be too :) It ended up costing me about $1.50 per serve.

Crumpets!

I made crumpets from scratch today for our breakfast! I love Saturdays.

I used this recipe, shared by Mangocheeks at Allotment2Kitchen.

I made some substitutions,, as per always! I used homemade hazelnut milk in place of dairy and wholemeal plain flour in place of white. It took a few goes before I got the hang of making them. The first few I put too much batter in the egg-ring so it turned out doughy and not bubbly, but they started to work well after I realised that! My egg rings are quite small so I could make many more than 12.

I love the little holes. I cooked them up last night, put them in the fridge, and stuck them under the grill this morning to heat through.

Yuuummm. On ours we had lots of nuttelex margarine, jam, and a fruit syrup in place of honey. I ususally buy rice syrup but the shop ran out so I got this instead. It doesn't taste nearly as much like real honey as the rice syrup does, but it does the job. I also think a cream cheese (Tofutti or something similar) would be delicious! I'm going to make some more sometime soon and freeze them.

Spiced Bean and Bulgur burgers with Silverbeet Stem Chips



Do you love my trashy stubbie holder as much as I do? Hahahaha

I made these the other night partly as a way to use up a heap of crap I have had lying around in my 'pantry' (I don't have an actual pantry so space is valuable) for too long, and partly because I haven't had a good vege burger for absolutely ages. The silverbeet on the side is a variation of a recipe I found in the Silverbeet chapter in the Kitchen Garden Companion (such an inspiring book!). It is truly an excellent way to use up those stems that always get left behind in the fridge to go soft! You CAN eat them, and they taste like the leaves, only subtler.

Anyway, to the recipe:

Spiced Bean and Bulgur burgers with Silverbeet Stem Chips
Makes 8 burger patties

Ingredients
For the Burgers -
2 1/2 cups cooked beans (I used a mix of white beans and black eye peas)
1/2 cup raw cashew nuts
1/2 cup bulgur/cracked wheat, soaked in 1 cup of boiling water until soft. Drain any excess.
1/2 cup mashed sweet potato
2 tbsp nutritional yeast
1 tsp garam masala
2 tbsp soy sauce
2 large garlic cloves, crushed
1/2 tsp curry powder, chilli powder, and ground coriander seed
1/2 cup whole meal flour
black pepper

For the silverbeet chips -
Enough silverbeet stems to serve who you are feeding (I used the stems of 1 bunch for two of us)
A few tbsp chickpea flour
Dried herb of choice
Juice of half a lemon
Oil for shallow frying

Method

In a food processor, combine the beans, cashew nuts and sweet potato. Blend until smooth (or if you like chunks, leave some chunks). Transfer to a large bowl and stir in the rest of the ingredients until well combined.

Shape into 8 flat patties and put in the fridge to firm up.

Meanwhile, slice the silverbeet stems into sticks. Bring a pot of water and the lemon juice to a boil. Boil the stems for 5 - 10 minutes. Drain and run under cold water to stop cooking and dry with a paper towel.

Put the dried stems in a bowl and toss with the chickpea flour and dried herbs.

Heat some oil in a frying pan and fry the stems in batches until crispy. Place on a paper towel lined plate in a warm oven.

You can either fry or grill these burger patties. They are good either way :) I fried mine in the oil left over from the chips, until brown on both sides. For lunch the next day I grilled them for 10 minutes on one side, 5 minutes on the other.

Serve on bread rolls with salad and sauce of choice :) tahini-mustard-sweet chilli sauce was pretty good :)

I made my bread rolls myself - I used the exact same recipe as the bread I make, but divided it after it's first rising into 6 balls before rising again. I think I cooked them for 25 minutes at 200 degrees, but check them after 15 just in case. They were pretty damn good!
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All these ingredients I found lying around my kitchen. The potato was in the freezer begging to be used, I always have beans in the freezer, cashew nuts and bulgur were the last of their packets...Any nut could be used instead of cashews, cous cous, quinoa, buckwheat or rice would be a good replacement for the bulgur wheat. (I have had the bulgur in a jar for over...2 years now. Shame! I can't remember why I had it in the first place.)

I am definately cooking my silverbeet stems this way again next time I have them. I usually just chuck them into a curry or stir fry, but this way of cooking  them preserves their flavour a bit more.

Creamy pasta sauce

Yesterday my sister was talking about how she was going to make carbonara for dinner that night. It made me really want carbonara for dinner. My thought pattern went straight to an alfredo sauce recipe I have made before, and I would just add some thinly sliced seitan (I use the Vegan on the Cheap recipe) into it to sub for the bacon, or pancetta or whatever it is that you use in carbonara. I thought I had everything for the recipe at home, so I didn't go get anything at the shops.

Of course I didn't have everything (I was missing the tofu, duh) so I just threw together this mess:

It actually worked out really well. It was in no way a carbonara (I couldn't even be bothered defrosting my seitan) but it is a creamy proteiny pasta sauce and it satisfied the craving. It's a good way to use up any okara you have leftover from soymilk making, I also chucked in some almond meal/pulp leftover from my almond milk making. It works, trust me. Next time I will use all soy/almond milk, but I had some coconut cream leftover in my fridge that I didn't want to waste.

Pasta with Cream Sauce (inventive, I know)
Serves 3-4

Ingredients
200ml light coconut cream
50ml soy milk (I just topped it up to 1 cup)
3 garlic cloves, crushed or grated
1/2 cup nutritional yeast (1/4 cup provides 400% reccomended daily value of B12 did you know?)
170g okara (what I had leftover from making milk with 100g dry soy beans)
1/4 cup almond pulp
1 cup 'chicken' stock
1 tbsp tahini
black pepper
1 tsp mixed herbs
1 tsp chilli powder
3 tbsp flour*

1 cup frozen green peas
1 cup cooked white beans

375g cooked pasta

Method

Put the first block of ingredients into a food processor and blend until smooth.

Put pasta on to cook, when almost done put mixture from the blender into a medium sauce pan on high heat. Stir until very thick. This won't take long. Stir through your beans and peas.

When pasta is done, drain it and return it to it's pot. Pour in the sauce and toss to combine.

Divide among plates and serve! We got three servings, but they were a little bit too big, so dividing it into four would probably be perfect.

So much of the okara I get from making soy milk gets wasted, which annoys me. I always have one lot in the freezer but never use it so I don't want to just keep freezing it all. However we have been using it lately! Such as in the above recipe, and the other week Nadine made an awesome lasagne and I told her to mix it into the plain tomato sauce. It made it quite meaty and cheesy tasting which we were pleased about. I'll use that trick again.

This ended up costing me $1 per serve (4).

*Next time I'll use only 2 tbsp flour.