cheese and spinach rolls

I had been thinking about these cheese and spinach rolls about which Carla posted. So I made them! They were super easy, and super delicious, though next time I think I might reduce the spinach just a tad. For reference, I used about 300g of tofu, which is about half a pack.

Also I skipped the food processor - I found it easier to mix by hand.

I made these as a mixture of triangles and rolls.

tofu cashew ricotta triangles

I managed to make it along to the El Joyero Market a few weeks ago, where Pip had a stall. I bought a few things, including some of her delicious roast pumpkin, cashew ricotta, and silverbeet puff pastry triangles. Inspired by deliciousness, a few weeks later we decided to give these a go.



It was mostly guesswork, we found a few recipes for cashew ricotta (in the end, Danni used the recipe in Veganomicon, with varying proportions), then Danni spooned them into some puff pastry squares, folded and baked! So I came home from class, and there were some delicious puff triangles for consumption.

She reports that it was pretty easy, and I report that it was pretty delicious!

things that didn't quite work

Here are some recent things I've cooked that haven't quite been as delicious as I might have hoped.



SJ has this really awesome tempeh bolognaise recipe, which I have made several times as the sauce for plain pasta. We thought we'd see how this went as a pasta bake, since it allegedly goes amazingly as a lasagna sauce. I topped this with grated cheezly and some nutritional yeast/savoury yeast flakes, and it didn't go that well. The sauce was either too thin to hold to the pasta, or too thick with tempeh to hold to the pasta. The very top of it, encrusted with cheezly and nutritional yeast, was quite tasty though.



The texture of this dish was perfect, and given it was brown rice I was quite pleased. However biriyani it was not. I followed this recipe ish, approximately anyway, and doubled the spices and added extra (garamasala, for example, featured heavily), and it was still kind of bland. Could have done with more spice. I might try this one again.



Lastly a curried vegetable pasty. Not sure where I got the recipe for this one, but again it was a bit bland, could have done with some more spices. Puff pastry covers many sins, but not all of them.

things with roasted pumpkin

We roasted a pumpkin last week, for the purposes of a leek and roast pumpkin risotto, but this left us with about a quarter of a roasted pumpkin languishing in the fridge. We didn't want it to go to waste, so we made an effort at turning it into deliciousness.



First, we picked up some fresh bread (wholemeal and multigrain, or pumpkin five seeds, something really chewy) and made some roast pumpkin sandwiches. We sliced the pumpkin like lunch meat, then heated them until they were just warm, and layered them with avocado, tomato, spinach, and hommous. Delicious!



Then I modified Pip's tomato tarts with white bean pesto (which she in turn modified from Lolo). I cut the puff pastry into quarters, and chopped the tomato slices into halves in order to fan them out across the squares. I also reduced the number of cans of beans to one, though I kept the amount of pesto at one third of a cup. I made half of the tarts tomato, and the other half little squares of roasted pumpkin. I could have piled the pumpkin and the tomato on a little heavier - the amount of puffing that took place would have allowed that. Still, these were tasty, and I will definitely make them again!

pumpkin and sweet potato filo parcels

Back in March, we attended a wedding dinner at the Hilton and had a very delicious sweet potato filo parcel, which we long thought about replicating.

I put it off and put it off, and I got home from class one night and there were these delicious parcels, waiting for me!



pumpkin and sweet potato filo parcels

ingredients
five long sheets of filo pastry
1 sweet potato
half a small butternut pumpkin
a few shakes each of ground cumin, dried rosemary, and dried basil

method
Peel and dice the pumpkin and sweet potato, removing the pumpkin seeds. Boil, with the rosemary and basil, until soft, and then mash, mixing in the cumin.
Cut the length of filo in half, across the long edge, and brush (with milk or oil) and layer into two piles of pastry. Divide the sweet potato/pumpkin mixture evenly between the piles, and wrap. Brush each parcel with oil or milk, and bake in the oven at 180C for about 30 minutes, or until golden.

Goes great with a salad or something.