Mmm fried bread

I bought a 1/4 green cabbage at Woolies the other day because it was only 74c and I didn't quite know what to do with it until I saw this recipe for Spiced Cabbage Flatbreads on Allotment2Kitchen.

I didn't follow the recipe almost at all, but I was certainly inspired by it.

In mine, I put green cabbage, grated purple carrot and their greens, onion, minced garlic and minced ginger. Then I mixed up a peanut sauce out of peanut butter and soy sauce and mixed it through before making up the breads. I also had some tempeh (found it at Coles for about $4 yay!) so I made a sort of tempeh bacon with it (essentially soy sauce, malt vinegar, smoked paprika and cayenne pepper).

The filling was so good by itself without even the peanut sauce! I could eat it all day. The bread was surprisingly easy to make, and they didn't even fall apart like I thought it would. I was thinking next time I'll cook it in my sandwich press instead of frying in a pan - no oil and a time saver! I could do four at once, and cook both sides at the same time. Maybe it'll work! I also used wholemeal plain flour.

I divided the dough into 8, and we ate 3 each for dinner and one was leftover for lunch the next day. These are also pretty good cold! They would be perfect for an appetiser at a dinner party with friends, and could be made smaller again. Go nuts with the filling!

Beans beans the magical fruit

We've been eating lots of bean based main meals and lunches lately, sort of a subconcious way of saving a bit of money - beans are so cheap, and I always have dried beans in jars or cooked beans in the freezer which also makes it a very easy fallback. The only thing is, we've hardly been eating any vegetables (other than beans and onion)! So I went to hang out with my mum in the city on Saturday I ordered the most vege-full thing I could. Bring on the brocolli!

The first thing that started us on the bean frenzy was this: Black Beans in a Red Velvet Mole, on page 134-135 of Appetite for Reduction, my new favourite cookbook. I picked this one night because I had a surplus of black beans in the freezer, and the ingredients sounded so weird and wrong together. Chocolate, tomatoes and chilli? Cinnamon and oregano? Why not! So I made it, it smelled like a cake when it was bubbling away, and at the end it was rather delicious. I don't know if I'll rush to make it again, but it certainly wasn't bad in the slightest! I served it with roasted sweet potato on the side. And I also think Australian chilli powder is way hotter than American - I only put 2 tsp in plus some red chilli flakes and it was just hot enough without burning my mouth out.

Next on the list was the Seitanic Red and White Bean Jambalaya on page 170-171 of Veganomicon. I obviously used black beans instead of white. I made this because I wanted to make risotto, but Nadine would be home late and risotto doesn't stay good for too long after you cook it. I'm sure Nadine wouldn't have minded, but that'll have to wait for another day! but anyway, this was so so good. I didn't have any tomato paste so I omitted it, I used brown rice and so had to cook it for a bit longer, and next time I make it (because I will) I'll put a bit more cayenne in it. I already doubled what it said in the recipe but it's still not much! This was really easy to eat, and was excellent for work lnuch the next day. Oh, and I didn't bake it - I don't think my casserole would be big enough, hahaha.

On Friday it was Nadine's turn in the kitchen - she made the Cincinatti Suburb Chilli on page 80 of Vegan on the Cheap. It was actually a bit similar to the Mole in that it also had cocoa powder in it! I love my bean chilli served on pasta so this was pretty damn good. We also added in some frozen corn kernels and a few cubes of frozen spinach because by this time I was getting a bit concerned about the lack of vegetable! The cheese sauce on top is from the same book, and I've made it a few times now.

No cows were harmed in the making of this toastie

This is a terrible picture, but there was leftover Cheese sauce so I had a cheese toastie in the morning for breakfast! I squeezed some yellow American mustard on it and some black pepper. This tasted like McDonalds - therefore would probably be amazing for a hangover breakfast! I'm going to have another one today but we have no bread so I'll need to run to the shops - I may also try to make some tempeh bacon to put in it. Could a toastie get any better??

So all in all, this week I'm pretty sure we've only needed to buy a million cans of diced tomatoes (we unfortunately have a smaller freezer now and I can't fit in any home cooked tomatoes :( ) and onions!

Homemade Laundry Detergent

We make a lot of everyday things from scratch at home, instead of purchasing at a shop. Some I have posted here on this blog: lip balm, deodorant, milk, bread, nut butter, (I couldn't find the deodorant entry!). But there are many more things I make regularly that haven't quite made it on here yet, but that I intend on eventually posting :)

We do this for a number of reasons. It saves us a helluva lot of money, it's healthier for us and the environment (no harsh chemicals), and it's surprisingly easy. And of course fun, because I am a nerd.

I am very happy Nadine has started to embrace her inner homemade nerd-dom! She decided one day that it would be fun to make laundry detergent, and reap the benefit of the fact that it costs a fraction of the price of the stuff we usually buy (Earth Choice).

I'll write the recipe here - she found it online somewhere, and I reckon it's pretty generic, but if it's yours give us a yell and I'll take it down.

Laundry Detergent

Makes enough for 160 washes

Ingredients

1.5L water

1 bar of soap, grated (you can use any kind, just the average size)

1/2 cup washing soda*

1/2 cup borax**

Combine water and grated soap in a saucepan. Stir over a medium heat until soap is dissolved.

Add the washing soda and borax and stir until thickened.

Pour into a 10L bucket or container with lid and fill with hot tap water and stir.

You can add a few drops of essential oil for fragrance if you like :) We used eucalyptus.

Use 1/4 cup per wash, or less if you like! We keep it in a plastic storage container, and decant it into a recycled Earth choice detergent bottle.

*Washing soda is sodium carbonate. you can buy it in crystal form at Woolworths but I think you can also get it as a powder. (1kg for $5)

**I found borax at Bunnings once for 1kg = $6. Nadine has recently seen borax at Woolies though.

Nadine says this detergent has made our clothes particularly soft! I hate to say this but I don't know because I don't do the laundry very often!

Birthday cupcakes :)

These are the cupcakes we made in replacement of the failed carrot cake cupcakes for my dad's birthday :) They are the chai latte cupcakes from Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World and are pretty amazing! I topped them with a vanilla cream cheese (I used King Land Soy Cream Cheese) icing with dusted cinnamon and grated 85% dark chocolate.

The recipe for the icing in the book makes a fair bit more than I needed for the actual cupcakes (which Nadine baked by the way) so I ate the rest out of the bowl. And felt sick. Also pretty sure my teeth will fall out.

Without icing



We figured out my carrot cake cupcakes didn't work because there was too much liquid in it (all the oil came out and dripped through the paper ugh). One of the ingredients is yoghurt and I used my homemade stuff which has a fair bit more water in it than store bought stuff. Ypghurt is also in the chai cupcakes but Nadine drained off the water and strained even more water out of the yoghurt and look! They turned out perfect.

Or maybe Nadine can just bake cupcakes and I can't!

Piping icing is messy. My piping bag is quite ancient and it sort of leaked out. I used a large star shaped nozzle.

Dammit now I want more.



Some interesting produce and souvlaki

Nadine definately knows how to make me happy :) She got me these purple carrots from woolies as a present. Yes I don't get jewellery or chocolates, I get carrots. And it's awesome.

I am actually growing carrots like these (pictured under chicken wire in background) but they aren't ready yet, and only 3 have survived. And I think my ones are orange on the inside, but these from woolies are white on the inside. They also taste like parsnip. In a good way.

I unfortunately decided to use them in some carrot cake cupcakes. Unfortunate because the cupcakes failed miserably. They still taste good so we are going to turn them into a pudding which I'll post later if it's worth it!

The other night I really wanted souvlaki. I am unsure if I've ever actually eaten real souvlaki before but I wanted it anyway. Souvlaki is a greek dish made from lamb chicken or beef, on a skewer. But I obviously didn't  use any of those meats, or put it on a skewer, I made up some seitan instead! I tried to make some seitan using okara but the whole thing fell to pieces in the saucepan, which sucked, so I went back to the recipe for 'simple simmered seitan' in Vegan on the Cheap which of course worked perfectly, since I've made  it a million times.

So, I cooked up the seitan, and sliced half of the recipe into strips (the rest went in the freezer). In a container went half a cup of red wine, a few teaspoons of dried oregano, 1 tsp smoked paprika and some black pepper. I put in the seitan strips, and filled the container with some of the simmering broth to cover the pieces. Shook it up a bit and left it there til dinner, maybe 1 hour?

Meanwhile I made up tzatsiki sauce. 1 cup plain soy yoghurt, 1 small lebanese cucumber diced, zest from half a lemon and juice from half a lemon. There is supposed to be garlic in it but I ran out. Also, I squeezed the cucucmber bits in a paper towel because I didn't want runny tzatsiki. It worked.

I fried up the seitan slices until they were browned and a bit crisp on the outside and ate it all in a multigrain wrap with the tzatsiki and some diced tomato and red onion.

It was so so good.

The only thing is it made the wrap turn into mush (gonna go the skewer route next time) and I wanted to eat more. But if I consumed any more gluten I may have ended up with a stomach ache! There can be too much of a good thing.

Dangerous Nuts Part 1: Bunya Nut Pikelets

Could you get any more Australian?

So why do I call them dangerous? Well, there is a few reasons.

1.If you sit under a bunya pine while it's in season, you may die. The cones are as big as your head (or bigger!) and can weigh upwards of 10kg. Don't try it. I noticed a tree in the Melbourne Botanic Gardens when I was there last that had a makeshift fence around to stop people having their picnics under it.

2.They can explode. Wear eye protection and stand back if you cook them on a bbq.

3.While trying to pry open a shell on a raw one with a hammer I nearly bashed my finger off.

4.While trying to cut open the shell on a soaked one I nearly chopped off a nipple with the handles of my secateurs. I don't know how, all I know is that it hurt like a motherf*cker. I hope I didn't do any lasting damage!

Okay, so bunya nuts are about as much of a pain in the ass to peel as chestnuts, but not quite. At least these ones stay whole. I looked up all sorts of ways to do it online, but they all sounded hard. One guy said to go outside and hit them with a mallet to crack the shells. I don't have an outside and I don't have a mallet. I could have boiled them whole and then peeled off the shells (with difficulty) afterwards but all my pots and pans were dirty and I couldn't be bothered. I could have roasted them, but I was afraid they'd explode and catch fire because I couldn't split them a little first.

So in the end I decided to soak them overnight in a bowl of cold water, figuring the shells would soften:

And in the morning the shells were indeed soft, so I could hit them a little bit gentler with a hammer than if they were raw-raw:

You can see the cracks in it. A bunya nut has a pointed end and a round end. At the pointed end there are 3 'seams'. Hit the hammer on one of them. The seams will crack and you can peel it.

I decided the hammer freaked me out too much as it was getting too close to my thumbs, so I dug out my secateurs (yes they are rusty and old and under-used and covered in WD-40 and potting mix but did I ever say my kitchen was sanitary?) and decided to just slice off the skins. Use them like a nut cracker first to split the seams (this was way easier than it was with the hammer) and then slice down toward the round end until you can force off the shell.

At this stage the nut can sort of be popped out. You don't have to struggle with pulling off the rest of the skin.

It may come out with a layer of brown stuff on it, like a shelled peanut:

I took it off. Dunno if you have to, I just did.

Now for the cooking. Once you have your desired amount of bunya nuts peeled, give them a bit of a rinse, especially if you used disgusting dirty tools like I did. Mmm WD-40, my favourite!

Then put them into a dry frying pan and cook, as if you were pan roasting cashews to make cashew butter:

Bits will go black and brown and they will smell nice. I had a lid over them for most of it because I didn't have a clean stirring spoon either (I know, I'm a slob) so I could just shake them around. I was also still scared of them exploding in my face (this is unlikely to happen!).

Once they are all browned like in the above picture, put them on a chopping board and use a sharp knife to finely chop like so:

You could just eat them whole too if you like, but this time I decided I wanted to put them in pikelets! Hence the chopping.

I ran a search on google for vegan pikelets as I have never made them before, and found this recipe on The Year of the Vegan which sounded perfect as I had some soft tofu in the fridge I needed to use before it turned yellow.

So I made the recipe exactly as it says except I used wholemeal flour, and didn't have any maple syrup so I used 1 tbsp of rice syrup instead. And at the end of all the whisking, I folded in half a cup of the chopped bunya nuts, and cooked as normal.

I spread vegan marg on them, sprinkled a few extra chopped nuts on top and drizzled them with a good amount of rice syrup. Yum.

(It took me so long to make them all they were cold by the time I got to eat them. But that's ok, they taste better cold and I'm pretty sure pikelets are meant to be eaten cold).

So to wrap up this god awful long entry, what do they taste like??

Well, like nuts, I guess. I want to say they taste like pine nuts (hur, hur!) but I'm not sure what they are like. They have also been compared to chestnuts, and I have to say that's probably the closest thing I can think of too. They have a different texture, quite soft (though that's probably because I soaked them) and were a nice addition to the humble pikelet. Now I have to think of what to do with the rest!! I bought a ½ kilo. Stay tuned for Dangerous Nuts Part 2 :)

Mmm Chocolate

I bought myself some new cookbooks for my birthday (cuz I totally need more cookbooks...) and they arrived yesterday!

And today was more of the ming numbing sameness as it has been for the last month or so so I was really hankering for a sugary sweet treat when I got home and Nadine had made me cupcakes from Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World! these are the Mexican Hot Chocolate cupcakes, which she chose because it didn't have icing and she didn't need to make soymilk for it (we had run out). These are rich rich chocolately cupcakes with a hint of cayenne with cinnamon and cocoa sprinkled on top with icing sugar. It's made with coconut milk (hence the not needing to make more soy) which made it even richer.

Yum. Exactly what I wanted! She even put them in little paper cups :)

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You Know You Hate Your Job When...You wish it was you who had the flat tyre on the way in, not your supervisor. Ha.

The cupcakes fixed it all though!