roasted nomliciousness at the perth squid house

When I was in Perth, my Mum was not the only person to cook for me! Towards the end of my sojourn in Perth, and a mere four hours after my good friend Dr G had returned from European Adventures, I meandered across the city to have dinner with Dr G, Gilli, Paul, Kandace and Rick, and sleep over the night. Sleepovers are the best!



We sat around and chatted for ages, before we sent Rick off to the kitchen to prepare a roasted feast, for which I had (in advance) declared my desire. Rick is an excellent roaster of noms, and on this occasion he was no less excellent than usual.



Our roasted feast featured potatoes, pumpkin, field mushrooms, and carrots, with some last minute peas for some extra colour. We also went old school, with some white bread and thick lashings of, well, in my case, nuttelex, but I believe in their cases some sort of dairy containing margarine.

I love a good roast, and the potatoes and pumpkin were perfect oh yeah. Coincidentally (or not, actually, it's just a good place for a story), it was Dr G who first introduced me to the joys of roasted field mushrooms just over a year ago. Since that initial introduction, I have not looked back, roasting field mushrooms with every roasting opportunity, though Dr G continues to make fun of me for always taking the stem off first (I find it tastier, as the stem can roll about in the pumpkin juices this way).



After a brief pause, we moved on to dessert. Kandace had modified a lemon and poppyseed recipe for her first attempt at vegan cupcakes, and I am pleased to report that these were a success. We ate these with mango sorbet and chocolate soya (the soya was from the Junction Icecreamery, which remains my favourite icecreamery ever). We conducted some tests to determine the exact proportions of icecream to cupcake necessary to get a hint of icecream flavour without overwhelming the cupcake, a task at which I think all of us succeeded. It was a pretty delicious taste combination.



Sleepovers! I highly recommend them. Also roasted noms.

roasted noms

Now that it's super cold, I'm really appreciating meals that have the oven on for ages! And so it was with great delight on Saturday night that we decided to roast some more things!



On the way home from my FOE shift, Danni, Jo and I swung by the Radical Grocery, where we picked up treats (ie, chocolate) and a veggie roast. We elected to try the Redwood Cheatin' Turkey Roast with cranberry and wild rice stuffing, as we had already tried the beef roast and the turkey roast (no stuffing) the previous weekend at a friend's birthday party.

This was an excellent choice, though it was quite heavy - we had one between the three of us, but it would probably work better between four or five people. This cooks best if it is wrapped in alfoil and roasted for ages (the same length of time as the potatoes, in fact), then left to cool for five minutes before carving.

This we served with roasted pumpkin, field mushrooms, and potatoes, as well as steamed corn. Some of us (not Danni) elected to eat some peas as well.

I love roast pumpkin. And roast potato. And roast mushroom. I like to put the mushrooms in the same tray as the pumpkin (much later than the pumpkin, of course), where they can slide about in the pumpkin juices. It is the best!

This amount of food maxed out the capacity of our oven, and kept us in leftover roast vegies for several days.

Dessert is not pictured: it was a pear + apple crumble, manufactured almost entirely by Jo, with chopping of vegiesfruits by Danni.

christmas day noms

This was our first Christmas away from our immediate families. Usually it's all go go go, from Christmas Eve through to sometime Boxing Day, but not being in close proximity to family meant that in the end, we had a very quiet couple of days.

After a very simple breakfast of field mushrooms on toast, I got started on some cooking and D got started on some cleaning (pausing every three minutes to send another IM). I prepared filling for Cindy and Michael's revolutionary vegan sausage rolls (vausage rolls) on Christmas Eve, but that was the extent of my advance preparations.



I'd not prepared a roast meal before, not on my own, so I smsed D's mum to ask her advice regarding roasted potatoes, drank some Pimms, and then got started.



In the meantime, our guests turned up, with delicious supplies! JS brought these amazing and simple cherries, which had been dipped in melted Lindt chocolate, and then frozen. The ice in the middle of the cherries made this simply superb, and I ate a lot of them.



She also provided some wreath-shaped brushetta! These were served with tofutti cream cheese, tomato, spring onions, capers, and parsley, and were also amazing!



A trick I learnt from my dear friend Dr.G is the roasting of giant field mushrooms, so when I saw some for sale at the markets on Thursday, I knew that they would be added to the roasting pan. I also roasted butternut pumpkin, and potato.



Other additions to our lunch time feast were potato salad, pasta salad, the Sanitarium vegie roast thing, and of course the vausage rolls. It was all of deliciousness!



We rounded out the meal with fresh berries and sorbet.

Finally, much later in the day, D and I ventured outside of the house to Enlightened Cuisine, where we had delicious Chinese noms for a moderately filling dinner with Kristy and Toby.

Hooray! I love whole days of eating.