Trying new things

Though I have basically ignored Andy's silly request that I avoid buying new cookbooks until I have tried *every* recipe in *every* cookbook we already have, I have been making an effort to try lots of new and exciting things. Because trying new things is good - it keeps us from getting in food ruts. And with a little bit of forward thinking, it isn't any more difficult than relying on old stand-by meals.

Here are a few new things we've been eating...

Beans and Greens, from The Urban Vegan. I used kale and cannelini beans, and added capsicum to the pan. Served on Creamy Polenta, from Let them eat Vegan! Both delicious - the polenta will probably be our new go-to polenta recipe because it is yummy. 

No-Fu Love Loaf, from Let them eat Vegan! Made from lentils, bulgur and oats, it is really the flavourings that make this a stand-out loaf. It's so yummy. Andy topped this one with a fancy pattern of BBQ sauce, tomato sauce and mustard. 

Okay, I cheat. This is also No-Fu Love Loaf - so not an entirely new thing. We really love it, and it's easy to make on a Sunday and leave in the fridge for later in the week. Last time I even made a double batch and put one loaf in the freezer. We cook ours on the BBQ - here with a jacket potato, and some kale with miso dressing.

Corn Pudding, from The Happy Herbivore. Though this cookbook isn't our favourite in the way that LteV! is, this recipe is a winner. It's like a silky, soft quiche full of corn. 

This is BBQ tofu in Classic Marinade from The Urban Vegan. But we've had that before. The new thing here is Muhammara, a walnut and capiscum based sauce. I spooned some on the tofu in the last few minutes it was on the BBQ. It was a yummy combination - a tiny bit spicy, but with interesting depths of flavour we don't usually eat. 

Mac-Oh-Geez! from LteV! I killed our blender a few weeks ago, so I made the nut-free version that used tahini instead of whole cashews. It was really nice - subtle, rather than cheesy, but super saucy. 

Here's the Mac-Oh-Geez! again. I added broccoli because that's how we roll. Oh, and Andy and I ate the whole pan in one go...

Too Good to be Tofu Burgers, in loaf form, from LteV! We used okara instead of tofu, and added a shredded carrot, and cooked our loaf on the BBQ with some pumpkin, beetroot wedges, and corn. As with the Nofu loaf, the flavour of this is something magical. 

Fruity Cereal Bars, from The Happy Herbivore. Mine didn't quite work out like they should have. Maybe my pan was the wrong size, but I needed more than half the batter to fill the bottom of the pan, which meant that instead of a solid layer of cakey stuff on top, mine was more of a crumble. I threw walnuts around to make it look a little more full on top. I used rosella jam for these, and they made a good afternoon snack. I wouldn't rush to make these again, but they were nice. 

 I have started ticking the recipes we have tried, and I am still woefully far away from getting even one entire cookbook under my belt. But nevermind - my copy of Asian Vegan Kitchen arrived yesterday so I have even more new recipes to try!

Hot for Harissa

Late to the party is a good way to describe me and food trends. Is harissa still even trendy, or has the hot sauce of the moment shifted to piripiri, sriracha, or something else?

We had a lot of chillies in the last two or so months. The ziplock bag in the freezer was full, so I started threading them on to string to dry out.

When the string got full and the chillies kept coming, Andy and I decided we needed to make some chilli sauce. A few of my cookbooks had recipes, but I can't go past Dynise Balcavage's recipes. Urban Vegan has a harissa recipe with aniseed, so I made a batch of that. And I fell in love. So did Andy. The jar is almost empty in the fridge, so I'll have to make a new batch soon.

I have used it to spice up some pasta with tahini sauce, kale, zucchini and tomatoes.

Kari came to the harissa party late with me, and posted this recipe using harissa powder. I made some small changes to suit what we had - and also, because I mostly remembered the recipe and didn't feel like looking it up. Chickpeas and sweet potatoes got smashed together with harissa paste and other veggies, and fresh coriander.

For dinner we ate it hot in wraps, and the leftovers were really great the next day in salad.

Finally, harissa butter made a delicious base for a kale pizza. Spicy, hearty with the kale, and accompanied by a less spicy, garlic&rocket&cherry tomato pizza.

Even though I'm late, the harissa party is still hot and happening, so, better late than never!

Meal Planning: Week 1

Despite saying in my page on spending less money that meal planning isn't really for us, I made it a resolution to be a bit more organised about dinner. But I didn't want to adopt the kind of meal plan that requires choosing recipes, buying specific ingredients, and following a plan very strictly. We need flexibility, and also Andy gets a little grouchy about buying things full price when there are on-special alternatives, so specific ingredients are rarely purchased in our place.

Our first week of meal planning didn't come about as much through planning as through indecision. Scene: Sunday morning, after breakfast, on the couch. Me: Do you want to go to the market? Andy: We probably don't need to. Me: But the only veggies we have are corn and lettuce... Andy: Well, let's have... dhal, nacho salad, burgers, gnocchi with pesto, and pumpkin risotto. Me: Wait, let me write this down.

So we had a vague plan. Then I realised I wanted fruit so we went to the market anyways, and came home with some more things: potatoes, carrots, sweet potatoes and beetroots (plus bananas, a bucket of mangoes and three pineapples). Add to that our eggplant bushes heavily laden with quickly-growing fruits. So I amended our meal plan.

Monday and Tuesday I was home still, not yet finished with my holidays. So I did a lot of prep stuff for the coming week - cooking beans, making chappati breads, and roasting eggplant. And then we enacted our meal plan: no set schedule, just a pretty good idea of what we could make given the ingredients on hand, and no real thinking required (for those nights after work where thinking is very undesirable). Here's how it shaped up.

Monday: Nacho salad. Chips and lettuce on the bottom, a mix of kidney beans, sweet potato, tomato, corn and rice in the middle, and a fresh mango-pineapple-cucumber salsa on top.

Tuesday: red lentil dhal with wholemeal chappatis. I didn't snap a photo of this, because it was just dhal.

Wednesday: kidney bean burgers, with grilled pineapple (under the patty), potatoes, and corn on the cob.

Thursday: gnocchi with eggplant balls and a pesto-y, tomato-y sauce.

Friday: Andy went off script, and crafted a semi-delicious curry of eggplant, tofu and jackfruit.

Since this seemed to work reasonably well for us last week, I tried again on Sunday, this time going a little more adventurous and looking for recipes that we could use. I'll give week 2 a post of its own when we've finished it, but so far meal planning seems to be going well. As long as it doesn't require buying special things, and we have the flexibility to cook what we feel like on a given night, it seems to work for us.I guess I should update the part about not meal planning soon...

Fresh Tomato Pasta

I have a pile of posts in my head, waiting to be written. I have photos from months ago to go with those posts. But, I have a full time job, and it's a lot more work than I ever expected. So the posts remain in my head, at least until I get better at time management. But I can manage this quick post, about a really yummy dinner I just ate.

This afternoon, we came home from work and went out to the garden and came back inside with this big bowl of tomatoes.

Then I went out again, and picked this smaller, but still big, bowl of cherry tomatoes.

While I was picking the cherry tomatoes, Andy was picking this big bowl of rocket.

We decided to cook them all up (not all the big tomatoes, but all the rest of everything) into a super fresh, very tasty pasta sauce. I grabbed a few sprigs of oregano from the garden, and some garlic, and cooked it all together with some olive oil, and salt & pepper. Tossed through pasta, it was a quick and delicious dinner.

Finished off with a bit of coffee & chocolate swirl coconut milk ice cream, what else could a weekday dinner want?

Cleaning out the Kitchen

As I said in a previous post, we have been doing our best, in the past few weeks, to clear as much out of our kitchen as possible. Instead of shopping, we have been emptying out the pantry, fridge&freezer, and garden. We have been buying fresh veggies still, because duh. But we have gotten our cabinets down to practically empty.

This is where we were up to on Wednesday morning.

Freezer: 2 blocks of flavoured tofu, 1 block of plain tofu, bread, 2 ice bottles (for keeping our food cool when we move), pumpkin ice cubes for Nacho, 2 seitan steaks, 3 pumpkin muffins, 1 jar of mango chunks, 1 jar of chickpeas, a handful of blueberries.

Fridge.

Pantry cabinet 1

Pantry cabinet 2

Pantry cabinet 3

Okay, so we still have a lot of food. But we have been focusing our eating-efforts on things we knew we could finish off in the timeframe. So a huge thing of chickpeas, and the 4 jars of jam Andy brought home from a field trip, weren't included in our list (you bet I made a list).

Eating down the pantry, for us, has meant eating pretty well. Here are some of the yummy things we've had so far...

 Remember when we bought 22 packages of sweet chilli flavoured tofu for 20cents each? We weren't even halfway through them when Andy brought home a few more packages of other-flavoured tofu, left over from a field trip which was massively over-catered. We're down to two, finally, thanks to meals like this one. Tofu, fried briefly. Also, brussels sprouts with leek, spinach, and the last of a jar of vegan bacon bits from the US. And basil potato salad in the background. The dressing for this salad used up a tin of coconut milk, a bunch of basil from the garden, and some capers from the fridge.

 

Pasta, from the pantry. Sauce, made from 3 tins of tomatoes, the last of a jar of tomato paste, some sundried tomatoes, the end of a jar of capers, a jar of artichoke hearts, and some green olives. And a heap of basil from the garden.

 Pizza/focaccia. In front, caramelised onion and za'atar focaccia. In the back, hawaiian pizza, which used up a block of seitan from the freezer and a tin of pineapple from the pantry.

Tapioca pudding, which used up all the big tapioca pearls, a tin of coconut milk, some bananas from the freezer, and some of the rainbow sprinkles from the pantry.

Black bean tortilla chip soup (based closely on the recipe from La Dolce Vegan), which used up a jar of frozen black beans, a chilli from the freezer, spinach from the garden, some chips, and a whole bunch of garlic chives from the garden.

Chickpea & seitan green curry. This used up a jar of frozen chickpeas, the last of the seitan blocks in the freezer, some garden spinach, all of the brown rice, a tin of coconut milk, a bit of ginger from the freezer, and the rest of a jar of green curry paste.

A green smoothie, which used the last of the frozen pineapple and bananas, and some spinach from the garden.

So not too much to go yet, but we still won't be eating like paupers, if the past fortnight has been any indication!

Blenderiffic

Having a blender/mixer thingie has revolutionised the way we cook.

Okay, I may be exaggerating a leetle bit. Or perhaps I'm exaggerating a whole awful lot. But a blender is better than a stick blender for things aside from smoothies.  Things like...

Tofu mayo. Caper and garlic chive flavoured. Which made a totally beautiful potato salad dressing.

And pesto. Yeah yeah, pesto is totally make-able, and arguably better, when done by hand in a mortar and pestle, but let's be honest. I haven't made pesto by hand in years, so a blender is pretty awesome. Plus, Andy went on a field trip which was wayyyy over-catered, and brought home some pinenuts. So we stuck those into our little "Magic Bullet-ish" attachment with some basil, garlic, salt and olive oil, tossed it onto gnocchi, and dinner took less than 10 minutes total.

Chocolate mousse! Though, this version probably doesn't deserve an exclamation mark. It should have been good - 1 block of silken tofu; 100gms of dark chocolate, melted; a big scoop of peanut butter; a shake of cinnamon. Blended. But it was just missing some essential sweetness. The bitterness of the chocolate overpowered everything else, so that you couldn't even taste peanut butter or cinnamon. So, no win there, but lots of ideas for future mousse experiments. And, smooth & fluffy-riffic, thanks to the blender.

Despite being disappointing, it was still good to eat with some Soyatoo whipped cream and rainbow sprinkles. Because really, what isn't?

And I will leave you with this photo of Andy draining the final dregs of the Soyatoo, which were no longer aerated and tasted overwhelmingly sweet and vanilla-y. 

You'll have to ask him if this was a good life choice or not.

alle Melanzane

My carbon footprint is not doing so well these days.  Of course we still ride our bikes to uni most days (I'm up to more than 1500km for the year so far!), and barely drive anywhere, and don't buy much stuff.  But, since the start of July, I have flown to Perth and Melbourne, and been a passenger on a drive to Cairns and back.  Andy has been a passenger in a road trip down to Keppel Island, about 10-12 hours of highway driving.  And we're in the final planning stages for a Round The World trip which will put all kinds of nasty emissions out there on our behalf.  So I'm feeling a little guilty.

So when a friend (hi James!) offered me some garden-fresh produce, of course I said yes.  In terms of 'food miles', I'm going to go ahead and assume these eggplants (and some yummy cucumbers) had a grand total of zero -- because they were transported by bicycle.

And they were super yummy, cooked down for half an hour or so, then mixed with tomatoes and herbs, following the recipe for Spaghetti alle Melanzane from Urban Vegan.  Except, instead of spaghetti, I served with gnocchi.

Because the other thing that suffers with all of this going places is spare time, so quick easy meals like this one are a necessity!

One Dish Round Up

For the past few months, I have been testing recipes for Carla's in-the-works cookbook about one-dish meals.  Andy and I tested a bunch of recipes around christmas, and then took a few weeks off from testing, before another big spurt in the last few weeks.  Carla has recently discussed a slight change in direction with her publishers - so I won't be testing any more.  However, I have really loved the recipes we have tested, so I'll post some photos here to give you an idea of the excellence that Carla manages to come up with.

 

 White bean peanut dip tastes like yummy peanut sauce, in dip form.  What else could you want?

Carla's spiced oven wedges have become a popular side dish, like here with sausage rolls.

Baked lemon tofu with green beans reminded me of an excellent flavour combination that I haven't taken advantage of in a while - lemon pepper.  Duh, but yum.  

Cream Sausage & Tomato Pasta was really easy to pull together, and very yummy.

The sauce, bubbling away on the stove after maybe 10 minutes of prepping and cooking.

 

Franks & Beans, which we actually served as "Bangers & Beans" using sausages, was super tomatoey and hearty.  Served with a side of creamy mushrooms, and some toast, this was almost brinner.

One of our favourite recipes is Carla's Crumbed Seitan.  The crumb mixture is a lot more interesting than our usual, so we've had this a few times.

 All fried up, these schnitzels are crispy and tasty.

We had them once with garlic mashed potatoes and mushroom gravy.

Then another time we served them up with mashed sweet potatoes (the ones with purple-red skin and white insides) and Easy Cheesy Gravy from Ultimate Uncheese.

And the leftovers from that were turned into parmas - a jar of enchilada sauce and some leftover cheesy gravy, and popped in the oven for a few minutes.

Two cuisines meet in Ethiopian Sweet Potato Stew, which matches the spices of Ethiopian cooking with the peanut stews of Western Africa, with sweet potatoes and chickpeas.

Seitan, marinated overnight in Thai BBQ marinade and then baked with some veggies and frozen spring rolls, made for a really yummy and really easy weekday dinner.

Red Seitan Curry required more effort than the last meal, but was well worth it on a Sunday evening.  The seitan is cooked in the curry itself, so it is full of flavour with a texture that is quite different to typical seitan.

Corn bread scones were simple to make, full of flavour, soft and delicious.  Declared by Andy to be the best corn bread I've ever made.

We served our scones with Kidney Bean & Sweet Potato Chilli, a thick and herby stew which we topped with jalapeno slices.

We made the chilli with a mix of orange sweet potatoes, and these beauties with an ugly white exterior but a brilliantly violet inside.

The chilli was reincarnated later in the week as Chilli Muffin Loaves, light little muffins with chunks of sweet potato and bean throughout.

Home made tofu is beautiful when marinated and baked, and Carla's Pan Pacific Marinade didn't disappoint.

My advice is to keep your eyes peeled for Carla's cookbooks, because if the recipes I've tried are anything to go by, they will be excellent.