berry and chocolate slice

The super awesome Fi bought the also awesome Danni the Vegan Junk Food cookbook for her birthday, and then it sat on the shelf for a month until I decided something needed to be cooked from it. I was, as I often am, keen to bake something but completely uninterested in leaving the house, so I picked the white chocolate raspberry bars (pg 205), and then modified them to work with what I had in the house and what I felt like.

And they turned out sweet, but excellent. Seriously, so sweet I needed water or black tea to drink with it to offset the sweetness, but if sweetness is your thing please feel free to go with it. 

I used a combination of strawberry, raspberry and mixed berry jams, because that was what I had in the house (there is a surprisingly large amount of jam in my fridge), but I suspect just about any jam would work. I have a pear and blackberry from Babka's that I particularly want to try in it. 

I've tried a couple of other recipes from Vegan Junk Food; book review coming soon!

berry and chocolate slice

modified from the white chocolate and raspberry bars in vegan junk food

you will need:

1 cup sugar

3/4 cup margarine and/or copha

2 tablespoons plain oil (canola or similar)

1 teaspoon vanilla

shake of salt salt

2 and a half cups of flour (I used a mix of plain and baking)

1 teaspoon baking powder

100g chocolate

half cup applesauce 

1 cup of raspberry jam

so then:

Preheat the oven to 175C!

With a fork, beat the sugar, vanilla, oil and margarine (melt the copha if you're using it and be prepared to wait one million years). Add in the flour and mix until crumbly. You may want to use your hands for this. When it's all crumbs, set aside a heaped cup of this mixture. 

Melt the chocolate, and add this and the apple sauce to the bigger portion of the crumb mixture. Mix it all together and then press into a lined square tin.* Bake this for 12 minutes, then remove from the oven, spread the jam over it, and sprinkle with the remaining crumb mix. If you had any more chocolate lying around the house you could put some on top, but I ran out. 

Bake for 25 minutes, and allow to cool completely before cutting. It'll still fall apart a little anyway, but it's better this way. 

Variants: desiccated coconut on top of the crumbly topping.

*I used a circle tin but only because while I was in China my square tin went missing !!!

cooking from books

Wendy and I went on an adventure to Wangfujing yesterday, because we want to stock up on Chinese cookbooks before we leave Beijing.
It was pretty exciting - this is not even half of the vegetarian section. Of course you may recall the problems I have at times had with being vegetarian in Beijing - enduring meat as garnish, 'it doesn't have egg, it's sweet' - so some of these vegetarian cookbooks have the occasional shrimp garnish, but the ones I have are super awesome and I'm so excited.
I have eaten so many amazing dishes while I've been in Beijing, that I cannot wait to start making these at home, and for my friends and family at home.

It was funny, my excitment over these cookbooks. I've mostly moved on from cookbooks in my life, because it's so easy to find recipes online. But a lot of this stuff I've never been able to find while searching in English, and when I google in Chinese often my eyes start to glaze over, and it's hard for me to skim read. So these beautiful cookbooks, with pictures, sometimes step by step.

Anyway, prepare yourselves, vegetarian Melbourne, for some delicious new experiments.

revolutionary tofu

At my workplace we have some very traditional food coming out of the kitchen, traditional in the sense of since the Cultural Revolution. A lot of the dishes we eat at work became common during the CR because they're fast, simple and nutritious, making use of the ingredients to hand and the conditions available. I plan to make a whole blog post about the food that gets dished up in the work cafeteria, which has been integral to introducing me to a whole lot of Northern Chinese food that I'm just completely unfamiliar with (being familially from a Southern province; and worse, being more immediately South-East Asian).

I've become a bit obsessed with this tofu dish, which made an appearance on my first trip to the cafeteria. I eagerly look forward to each reappearance, and finally I gave it a go recently. It's so simple it doesn't need a recipe, though I found a reference to it in The Cultural Revolution Cookbook, a cookbook I would seriously consider buying except it's still got a whole lot of meat in it.



sesame tofu with spring onion
recipe helped by the cultural revolution cookbook

This makes a great side dish or salad to a flavoursome meal. I've been eating it in winter but look forward to serving it as a summer salad. I know it sounds plain and boring (and the picture doesn't help) but the sesame oil does something magical to the tofu that makes it very moreish. You may want to adjust the amount of sesame oil you use depending on your tastes, and you could also sprinkle some sesame seeds on the top.

ingredients
1 x 300g block of firm tofu
1 or 2 stems of spring onion
2 teaspoons sesame oil
salt

method: In the microwave, heat the tofu whole (and drained and rinsed) until it's pleasantly warm to the touch; should need no longer than a minute. Alternatively, soak the tofu in hot water for a minute or two. In the meantime, slice the spring onion small and on an angle, along the bias. Use the green and the white parts! Combine the sesame oil, spring onions and salt. Dice the tofu into chunks about half an inch across, and mix the oil through a little roughly - the tofu can break apart somewhat. Serve warm.

baking from babycakes

I've been a little bit intrigued by Babycakes ever since I first heard of it; however I have little chance of visiting the shop any time in the near future, so it was with delight that I borrowed the Babycakes cookbook from Emilly.


I've tried baking two things so far. The first was the gingerbread cake, which I first tried at Emilly's birthday. I was taken by how moist and delicious this cake was. The added pumpkin makes it really moist. I cheated and made a very sugary cream cheese topping instead of making the frosting in the book, but the cream cheese complemented it quite well.

The cake itself was tasty, but it dried out very quickly, which is a shame as it makes quite a lot, so there was a lot to get through.


look at all that spare apple!
I followed this up with the apple and cinnamon muffins. I get really grumpy at recipes like this, where they tell you to do something (roast eight apples) and then you only use a portion of the end product (one cup of roasted apples). It is a good thing I was feeling lazy and only ended up roasting five apples.

There were other modifications I made as I went on, most of them already written in pencil in the cookbook; significantly reduced the amount of agave and the amount of vanilla essence (two tablespoons!), and some other modifications I cannot recall as the book is not in front of me.

Overall I've found the book a tasty experience so far, though of course I will require more testing in order to truely guage how I feel about the book.

reloving vctotw with almond cupcakes

So, it turns out I really like baking.

And one afternoon I was cruising about the Australian vegan blogosphere and came across ML at Drossolaila baking the apricot glazed almond cupcakes from Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World, and I thought about them constantly for a couple of days. I think it was the photo, which tells you the importance of good photography!

So when I was inspired to do some baking a few days later, I knew exactly what I wanted to bake.



These were good! Not too difficult to make, though I had trouble with an ingredient or two and had to make substitutions. They held up to the ravages of time, and were still tasty three days later, which I like in a cupcake. And they looked cute! It didn't make as much batter as I thought it would, and they were very sweet, but I liked them. And it was nice to come back to VCTOTW, which I avoid for long stretches of time between failures or disappointments, and have something nice.

Maybe I will add dried apricot pieces to the batter next time, though that might make it over-apricoty.

They're in green pattycake papers because I baked them the day before the federal election, and I had hopes for the Australian Greens.

A++, would make again!

mocha brownie

I am, as previously blogged, on a hunt to find a decent brownie recipe. Of course I would prefer the BEST MOST AMAZING BROWNIE EVER, but given my repeated failures I would, at this point, settle for merely a decent brownie.

I recently tried the brownies recipe from The Complete Vegan Kitchen, pg 300. This book has been one I've not used that often, which I'd like to change. So I gave this brownie recipe a go.

It calls for 'half a cup of very hot espresso,' which I think I increased just because I used the moka pot to make some coffee and poured it all in, ended up being about three quarters of a cup. I also used a cup of coconut sugar, which is the MOST DELICIOUS SUGAR IN THE WORLD, instead of white or brown sugar. It tastes like Milo.

I also made a few other tweaks, so I reproduce the recipe with my mods below! I thought the brownie was good, but needed more chocolate; Danni and Jo both pronounced the brownie good, but needed more coffee (they're wrong).




mocha brownie
modified from pg300 of The Complete Vegan Kitchen

ingredients
about three quarters of a cup of strong, hot, freshly brewed coffee
almost half a cup of cocoa
one cup coconut sugar
quarter cup chocolate chips (optional: this will add the extra chocolate flavour)
half teaspoon vanilla extract
quarter cup canola oil
one and a quarter cups of plain flour
one teaspoon baking powder
shake of salt

method
Whisk the coffee (very hot!) with the sugar and cocoa and chocolate, then add the vanilla extract and oil and combine until it's all smooth. Add the flour, baking powder and salt to the wet ingredients, gradually, until just combined.

Bake at about 175C for 30 minutes. I recommend a square tin that has been lined or greased. Let it cool for a bit in the tin before removing and cutting.

triple threat chocolate cheeze cake from my sweet vegan

This chocolate cheezecake (from My Sweet Vegan, pg126) was so incredibly rich, if you look at the photo you can see where the vegetable fats started to separate. I think our oven was too hot (it often is), or the cake didn't need quite so long, because it was a little over cooked.

Although it has three layers, it was not overly complicated or time consuming, though I did have to do a lot of mixing. Hooray for the Bamix! I didn't make many mods - I used Nice biscuits, like I usually do with cheezecake, and I'm not positive that I used granulated sugar (often I use caster sugar instead).

It was so rich, I refused to eat it later in the week.

Next time I make this, I will a) allow myself more time (it was still warm when we went to eat it a few hours later), and b) use the leda chocolate tim tam things, in order to make it gluten free.

I really like My Sweet Vegan, I've made some delicious things from it. Highly recommended!

breakfasting, including scrambled tofu

I really enjoy making breakfast! I like eating curry + roti canai, or making some mai fun, or scrambled tofu on toasts. We often have pancakes. We have even been known to have mushrooms and avocado.

We recently invited our friends Nix and dB over for breakfast and a spot of tea, as they had been away in England for a few weeks. I was worried that serving them something a bit English-breakfasty would be tiring and same-same for them, but I was reassured that breakfast in England only comes in one colour (grey), so anything I served would be very welcome.

Hooray!



I love a good scrambled tofu, so I knew I'd be making that. I'd once previously made the cheater's baked beans from Vegan with a Vengeance, and remembered it as tasty, so straight into the oven went those. I remembered Cindy blogging about the hash browns from Vegan Brunch, so I thought I'd give that a go well. Combined with toast, it seemed a well-rounded breakfast!

The baked beans, as I had hoped, worked a treat. I kept them in a little long, so they ended up slightly burnt, but they were still very tasty, and I spied several breakfasters eating directly from the baking tray long after they had declared themselves full. The scrambled tofu was as it always was, ie, delicious (recipe at the end of this post - yes, after many weeks, finally, a recipe!). The hash browns left a bit to be desired. It wasn't that they were bad, they just weren't spectacular. It's also the first time I've tried making hash browns, so I'm still on the search for a good recipe!



scrambled tofu

ingredients
600 grams of firm tofu, drained and slightly pressed (pressing is optional!)
half a red onion (diced, or sliced into thin rings)
half a punnet of cherry tomatoes, halved
half a carrot, grated
half a cup (ish) nutritional yeast/savoury yeast flakes
five or six dashes of dark soy
1 or 2 fresh chillis, sliced
cumin and tumeric to taste (I use about half to one teaspoon of each)
some pepper

method
In a little bit of olive oil, fry the onion and the chillis on medium to high heat. As it starts to soften, add the cherry tomatoes and carrots, and keep frying until the tomatoes start to wilt. Add the tofu, and break it up to your preference (I prefer it to be completely broken up, but some people prefer to keep it in chunks). Add in the remaining ingredients, and leave to simmer for five to ten minutes. You may want to add more soy sauce (I often do).

Hooray! That's it! Serve and nom.

mixed vegetable and lentil curry

After several weeks of eating at a lot of restaurants, I'm trying to do a similar thing to Jess, and eat mostly at home for the next little while.

I started before Danni's parents even left, kneading the pizza dough as they loitered waiting for Danni to take them to the airport. But you have seen my standard pizzas before, so I don't really need to blog them!

Tuesday I slacked off, and we had scrambled tofu for dinner (but I made it!).

Wednesday I had the day off work, so I spent the afternoon experimenting with kaya, and then decided to cook a curry before I hurried out the door to my class. We have a lot of chillis growing on our balcony (it's awesome!), and the weather is growing colder, so I'm starting to cook a lot more curries.



mixed vegetable and lentil curry

This is sort of based on the Sindhi vegetable and lentil curry in The Asian Vegan Kitchen (pg 23). I took the basic idea and then modified it to suit what I had and what I wanted.

ingredients
half cup yellow lentils
half cup red lentils
1 teaspoon ground cumin
half teaspoon turmeric
1 teaspoon cayenne pepper
1 tablespoon ground coriander
1 clove garlic
a little bit of ginger
3 fresh red chillis from my garden! (these were quite hot)
1 brown onion (diced)
4 tomatoes (diced)
2 potatoes (peeled, washed and diced roughly)
1 carrot (peeled and diced)
quarter head of cauliflower (wash well! then chop into small florets)
1 bushell spinach (wash super well, and roughly shred)
2 cups water
2 cups stock


method
Rinse the lentils, then soak in a little hot water. Saute the onion (in some oil) with the cumin, turmeric, cayenne pepper and ground coriander, then add the ginger and garlic (both minced), as well as the chillis. Chillis should have been chopped, with their seeds.

After the onion starts to soften, drain the lentils and add them, as well as the tomatoes, potatoes, carrot, cauliflower and spinach, preferably in that order. I like to let the tomatoes, potatoes and carrot cook for a couple of minutes before I add the cauliflower and spinach, but you may not!

Add the stock and the water, and mix, then leave to simmer on medium to low, covered, for about 25 - 30 minutes.

This is a tiny bit spicy! Also very liquidy, perfect for rice and roti.

tomato and roasted eggplant stewed with chickpeas from veganomicon

On Wednesday I spent all day out and about at meetings, then went straight from meetings to class, so I knew that by the time class let out I would be quite hungry. With this in mind, I told Danni that she would be in charge of making sure there was dinner for me to eat upon my arrival home.

With assistance rendered by Jo, Danni picked the tomato and roasted eggplant stewed with chickpeas, found on page 179 of Veganomicon. They elected to serve this with the poppyseed polenta, located on page 115.



I really enjoyed the flavour of the roasted eggplant, it added something quite excellent to the stew. Jo and Danni would like me to point out that this recipe is quite fool-proof. The recipe called for a cup of wine, which they added, and then proceeded to drink the rest of the bottle between them, so by the time I got home they were both extremely soused, and they had followed the recipe all out of order. And yet it was still quite delicious, and very enjoyable.

Even allowing for inebriation, Danni suggests the 'one hour and ten minutes' given for the recipe is a lie, though the forty minutes roasting is correct.

curries from the asian vegan kitchen

Recently Miss T has been on a quest to end same same cookering, and this resulted in some cookering from the Asian Vegan Kitchen. As this is a book I have and haven't used it a while, I thought I would give it a go!

I was feeling in a curry mood (nb: this is actually my normal state), so I picked something with liquid, the assorted vegetables in cashew gravy (India, p18), and something with lots of spicy, the fiery potato curry (Malaysia, p160). In contrast to Miss T, however, this did not prove an end to same-same cookery.



The fiery potato curry had that strong, slightly assam, overwhelming flavour I associate with my childhood. It was not until I was pounding the spices together that I realised that the smell was so familiar, a smell I used to hate when I was a kid, and I flipped back to the book and I looked at the Malay translation: kari pedas kentang. Oh, of course.

Don't get me wrong, this curry was delicious. It would have been more delicious if I had cooked the onion for longer, but it was rich and full-flavoured, and delightfully spicy (and, incidentally, nowhere near as spicy as I had thought it would be). It's not something I've cooked before, but it's not something unfamiliar, so I was a bit annoyed at myself! It was still good, and I will probably cook this one again.



The assorted vegetables in cashew gravy was nice, but a bit bland. The recipe calls for presteaming the root vegetables - if I were to cook this again I would instead go for a longer cooking time and try to cook the vegetables in the sauce. I would probably also add a little bit more chili, and maybe a bit more coriander. It did make a nice contrast to the fieryness of the potatoes.

I modified the potato curry to make it gluten free; the cashew gravy was already gluten free. Then of course we ruined it by serving on roti, but that's because roti is the best.

things with tofu from vegan brunch

Well, internets, I am back at work today.

This meant an early start to my day, a few pieces of toast and out the door. But whilst I was still off work, we tried for some big breakfasts, and I trawled through Vegan Brunch for some tasty looking things. Earlier in the week we tried the gingerbread waffles, which made enough batter for two days worth of breakfasts (four penguins for each of us each day, sixteen penguins in total).

A few days later, Danni was watering our plants and noted the huge amount of basil growing cheerfully away, so I took the opportunity to try the scrambled tofu with pesto.



This didn't seem to be so much scramble as cubes. I really liked this dish - frying the tofu for so long as the tomatoes smushed down (my favourite way of eating them) added this really great flavour, and I loved the addition of pesto. Will definitely do this one again - maybe with smaller cubes.

The next day we tried the omlettes, which Cindy had blogged about as delicious.



Don't get me wrong, these were great (and delicious), but I had two problems. They took an incredibly long time to cook - D had already finished her omlette well before I was ready to eat mine; and my pan is old, so it was less flipping and more failing and looking a bit scrambled. Not so much a problem but more an inconvenience, it was a Sunday morning and I couldn't be bothered traipsing around to find black salt, so I went without.

Still, these were really delicious and, though they require many dishes, I will probably try this one again as well.

We have a lot of left over cheeseish sauce, I'm thinking of using it in a pasta bake this evening. Mmm pasta bake.

gingerbread waffles from vegan brunch

Danni got me Vegan Brunch for Christmas this year. I was pretty excited!

So far we've only made the one thing (gingerbread waffles). These were tasty but the fresh grated ginger overwhelmed everything else, so it was less gingerbread waffles and more ginger waffles. The chocolate icecream didn't really go with this.



This book seems to be set out a lot better than Veganomicon, which I appreciate. The stock photos are a bit weird, almost like the spaces were set for photos and then no one got around to taking them. But overall everything seems cool.

Lots of other interesting looking things to try. I'm looking forward to doing something tofu-related for breakfast tomorrow. Or perhaps something potato related. Something delicious, anyway.

chocolate melting moments

When I'm feeling lonely I tend to do a lot of baking and cooking. I opened Vegan Indulgence twice this weekend, once for melting moments and once for chocolate berry cake. I love both of these recipes, even though something went wrong with the cake and it became fail cake (still delicious!).

scalloped potatoes + pasta with a raw tomato sauce

Saturday night dinner on my own: scalloped potatoes and a pasta served with a raw tomato sauce.



I had never cooked scalloped potatoes before, so I was very intrigued to give it a try! This was the focus of my cooking for Saturday night, but I wanted something else to go with it, for although potatoes are very delicious, they are not really a meal on their own.

The sauce was based off a recipe in New Asian Traditions. It was made up of two tomatoes, roughly chopped, with a small handful of sun-dried tomatoes, and some oregano and basil, all blended together. I tossed this through the drained pasta fresh off the stove, so the sauce warmed but was still raw. It was awesome!

Not as super awesome as the scalloped potatoes though, I was very happy with them.

scalloped potatoes



This made three serves of a side of potatoes – I could have used a tiny pot but I loved the idea of potato left overs.

ingredients
three large potatoes
half a brown onion
two cloves garlic, minced
¼ tsp nutmeg
2 tbl savoury yeast flakes/nutritional yeast
1 tbl plain flour
quarter cup of cashews
1 cup water
1 cup soy milk
salt + pepper
nuttelex for cooking

method
Wash the potatoes, and slice into thin circles. Dice the onion. In some nuttelex/marg, start to fry the onion, then add the garlic and the potato. Continue frying for about ten minutes, or until the potato starts to brown.

In the meantime, blend together the cashews, nutmeg, savoury yeast flakes, flour, water, soy milk, salt and pepper. When the potato and onion is ready, put into a baking dish, and pour the sauce mix over the top. Mix slightly if needed. Cover and bake at 200C for about thirty minutes, then remove the lid and bake uncovered for another ten minutes.

birthday noms for dr a

Due to uni, rotations and various other commitments, although it was Dr A's birthday two weeks ago, we only just got around to celebrating with him yesterday.

We started with the essential fairy bread:



This is a necessary part of any birthday party. At work people mock me for providing fairy bread, but it is always the first plate of food to be finished! Because it is basically sugar and whitebread, zero nutritional value but filled with deliciousness!

An attempt at substance was provided by sausage rolls and pizza:



I made the sausage roll mix the previous afternoon, and in the morning thawed the puff pastry and rolled the rolls. As previously, the sausage roll mix was from a recipe by vegetation, very slightly modified. Pizza base was made by D in the morning and left to rise for a little bit.

The food was rounded out by the almond cake from My Sweet Vegan. The cake was okay, very goopy when making it and very heavy when eating it, and I didn't enjoy the ganache at all. So although everyone else seemed to like it (UNLESS THEY WERE LYING), I'm not sure this one will be a repeat.

cream of mushroom soup from soup for all seasons

We're definitely giving soups a lot of consideration this winter, which is lots of fun. It involves lots of making toast soldiers, and carefully balancing my bag with my lunch leftovers on the bus in to work.



D gave the cream of mushroom soup from Soup for All Seasons a go this week, it involves a whole bag of mushrooms and a lot of stirring. The end result was not quite as creamy as we might have hoped, you'd do better to add a little less stock (certainly not the full six to eight as suggested in the recipe). Also the giant pieces of mushroom were not quite my thing, though the flavour of the soup was quite nice.

Will give this one another go sometime, perhaps with some slight modifications. I would want to cut the mushrooms a little smaller, perhaps pulse it a little just to mush it the tiniest bit. D rates this soup delicious.

thai stir fried noodles from the asian vegan kitchen

Part of our ongoing mission to discover the perfect pad thai recipe, we gave the Thai stir-fried noodles from The Asian Vegan Kitchen a go during the week. You can find the recipe on page 124.



These noodles were not difficult to prepare, and we had to leave out the tofu, radish and beansprouts as we were sadly lacking them. I substituted plain rice vermicelli for the sen lek, even though I later discovered I had some sen lek hiding behind the rice bin.

This dish was spicier than I expected it to be - I expected it to have no bite, as it contained only one teaspoon of cayenne pepper, but that was sufficient to add quite a good spicy bite to the noodles.

This was a good dish, but not quite the noodles dish that I was expecting, so our search for the perfect pad thai recipe continues.

leek and potato soup from soups for all seasons

I've been a lot under the weather, so on Monday we delved into Soups for All Seasons for some nourishing soups. We made the leek and potato soup. It was creamy and delicious, though D found it a little bland. I was okay with this, as I wasn't feeling fantastic by Monday night. The soup was also a little bit stringy. If we made it again we would cut the leek into rounds, rather than into lengths - the text was not specific, and I just chopped the leek the way I usually would, into lengths.

Overall, though, it was a very satisfactory experience. We served it up with some sourdough baguette, of which, it turns out, I am not actually fond.

pumpkin soup from soup for all seasons

On our recent trip to Melbourne I picked up Aduki's Soup for All Seasons, written by the mob from Las Vegan. I was fueled by the soup obsession ignited by the leek and potato soup at R+K's wedding.

D whipped this up whilst I was at my German class, and it was (soooup-er) easy and delicious. It is the second soup we have tried from this book, and so far we are definitely two-for-two delicious. Only notes for it are that we mashed in the pot instead of blending/processing, leaving it still a bit chunky.