sweet potato burritos

I don’t have a great story for this one, I was feeling unwell yesterday afternoon, so instead of going to my German class I went straight home from work and curled up in bed, so instead of whatever was lying around the house (the original plan), D felt obliged to cook a full dinner before rushing off to band practice. D thought of this on the walk down from West Perth to Woolies in town, and gets full points for awesomeness. It was so tasty, I want to eat it again very soon!

Mexican food is not so ubiquitous in Australia, so I don't really have a lot of experience with it. There is usually only one brand of tortilla in supermarkets! I apologise if you make it and go, "doesn't taste like any burrito I've ever eaten." It is still very tasty. Also I apologise if this isn't actually a burrito, and is infact an enchillada! I took some time deliberating over which it was this morning, but I think the wheat tortilla makes it a burrito. Feel free to educate me in the comments if need be.



sweet potato burritos

ingredients:
four tomatoes (diced)
1 can kidney beans
1 can refried beans
1 sweet potato
shake or three of cumin, cayenne and paprika
dried chilli
small handful of pumpkin seeds
1 quarter red onion (diced)
6 wheat tortillas

method:
In some olive oil, fry the cumin, cayenne, paprika and chilli. As it becomes fragrant, add the tomatoes, red onion, and kidney beans, as well as some of the liquid from the kidney beans. Leave to simmer on medium-low, with the lid on, for about twenty minutes, adding water about halfway through if necessary. In the meantime, mash the sweet potato. After twenty minutes, the mixture on the stove should have reduced beautifully. Add the refried beans at this point, and leave to simmer another five minutes. Reserve about a half a cup of the mixture (preferably with minimal kidney beans), and mix the rest with the sweet potato. Divide the mixture evenly into the tortillas, roll and place on a baking tray. Drizzle with the reserved liquid, and bake on 170C for about ten minutes.

Because I used full-sized el paso tortillas, I found that one and a half were plenty for me, so this serves about four people.

Serve with guacamole.

bruschetta

A couple of weeks ago we invited S and Dr A around for dinner. S is ethnically Indian, so when I asked "Asian or not-Asian" she leapt for the non-Asian option, at which point I started fretting - I didn't know what to cook! The old faithfuls, that always, always work, are curries and laksa and things with noodles. Venturing out of that territory feels like hit or miss, though I know, logically, that I am getting pretty good with it all.

D suggested we give bruschetta a go, as the pre-entree snack. Which brings me to a slight aside: because I've grown up in Australia, when I say 'entree' what I mean is 'small first course.' I was so confused the first time I read Vegan with a Vengeance, wondering why the entrees were so late in the book, and why they were so substantial...

I've only had bruschetta a few times in my life, so I don't know how close this is to being actual bruschetta, but it was tasty and I believe it meets the general requirements (bread, fresh tomato, basil, not too much else), so I'm going to call it a success.





bruschetta

ingredients:
one long stick of crusty bread
olive oil
tomatoes
basil
parsley
red onion
salt
pepper

method

I don't think measurements are strictly required in this instance, as your bread stick could be ridiculously long, you might like lots of red onion, etc. But in general:

Slice the bread into rounds, brush with olive oil, and bake at 150C for 15 minutes. Meanwhile, as your kitchen is filling with lovely bread-baking smells, dice the tomato and red onion, and combine with shredded basil, shredded parsley, a dash or two of salt and pepper, and a little extra olive oil. Leave to sit, and when the bread is crisp , dollop the tomato mixture on top. Serve as soon as possible.

five spice tempeh

I love the taste of five-spice. One of the first things I made my mum teach me to cook was five-spice chicken, marinated for hours and fried in the wok and baked. I remember watching her so many times as I was growing up, the noise of the wok and the smell of the spice and it was actually the last thing I cooked involving meat.

I’ve put it out of my mind for years, unable to decide what could hold its shape and yet soak in the flavour of the spices. Potato wouldn’t take to the frying, and tofu would fall apart, and no other vegetable would have the right texture. I’m not a huge fan of tempeh, but in a wave of inspiration I decided to give it a go last week, and it went exactly the way that I felt it should, even though my five spice is a little old. The tempeh was spicy, and crisp, and that smoky, delicious flavour was just as I remembered it, and I made it again last night.



five spice tempeh

ingredients
1 pack tempeh
1 tablespoon 5-spice
4 tablespoon dark soy
1 tablespoon light soy if the mixture is looking a bit strong

You will need a gas burner, and a wok. You might get away with using a frying pan, but frying pan is a different style of frying and I take no responsibility for any lack of wok-hei or change in cookability that you may encounter.

method
Mix together the five spice and the dark soy, until the spice has dissolved. If it’s looking a bit too overwhelming, add a dash or two of light soy. Slice the tempeh into fingers about 15mm by 10cm, then coat in the marinade. There should be enough marinade to coat the tempeh, and still have a bit of liquid floating around the bottom of the container. Sit for at least an hour in the fridge.

Wok on the stove, burner up high. Put a little bit of peanut oil in a wok, no more than two tablespoons, and swirl around up the sides. Using chopsticks or tongs, place the tempeh first in the middle, where the oil should be starting to pool, and then up in the ring around the centre, where the flames hit the wok. Don’t do all of the tempeh at once, at least not if you’ve never used this technique before – perhaps do six or seven slices at one time. Turn each slice, occasionally but not constantly swirling the oil through the centre and up the ring (just when it looks like you need more oil up there), for about three or four minutes. Remove the tempeh to a tray, and continue wok frying until all the tempeh has been through the wok. Spread on oven tray, and bake on 180C for about fifteen minutes, turning halfway.

The wok crisps up the outsides, and the oven allows it to gently bake the flavour through. The oil left has this great crispy, spicy wok-hei kind of flavour, which last night I used to fry sliced mushrooms, something I will elaborate upon in another post.

Serve the tempeh any way you please, I like to serve it on a bed of bean shoots or cucumber, or just eat it straight from the oven.

steamboat

Mum and I came back from Penang determined to have a steamboat before the winter was out. Yet here we were, mid-October and still no steamboat in sight. So last night we headed up to my parents' house, where we partook in one of my favourite methods of food preparation, the steamboat.



Steamboat is a great way to have friends around for dinner, I like to refer to it as, what we have instead of barbeque. The steamboat sits in the middle of the table, either powered by electricity or more traditional means (in my parents' case, this means by heat beads), and has a chimney protruding from the centre of its bowl. Stock is poured into the bowl of the steamboat, and delicious things are dropped in to sort of steam but mostly boil in the middle of the table as the everyone surrounds the table, chatting. We serve with copper baskets and wooden chopsticks, with a ladle or two for the delicious broth which becomes more and more delicious as each course passes. The stock left by the end of the meal is delicious, having steeped in ten or twenty different flavours for the last two hours, it is my favourite.

Last night we had two boats going, one for meat and not meat with chicken stock, and one for not meat with vegie stock. This worked pretty well, though we almost had a few careless moments with appropriate (not contaminated) implements.

We had five courses in the vegie boat: tofu, chinese cabbage and choi sum (with rice noodles); fake fishballs with carrot and chinese cabbage (and maggi noodles); cauliflower, broccoli and carrot (with kuay teow noodles); giant button mushrooms with golden mushrooms; and snow peas, chinese cabbage and maggi noodles.

The emphasis is on simple ingredients, and the mix of those flavours - no marinating beforehand, no flavouring with spices before cooking. Some light soy sits on the table, and we pour it into the tiny sauce bowls in front of us. The chillis, fried shallots, and spring onion gets passed around the table for flavouring, but we rely on the flavour of the broth and the flavour of the ingredients to combine and make tasty course after tasty course.

It's sometimes frustrating that I still don't have a steamboat of my own, but I'll get one someday, and it will be awesome. For now, I promise my mum I'll help her prepare the vegies, and dance around her kitchen, like I have been for years. And it's great.

nasi goreng - modifications

I don't eat nasi goreng anywhere near as often as I would like to, because we usually eat up all the rice before it becomes old enough to goreng. Had it recently, though, because I knew I'd be home late the next day so I cooked an extra two cups to ensure nasi goreng the next day! I am so pleased with myself, I think I'll be using this trick more often.

I got home from my German class to find D in the kitchen prepping the vegies, and there was a sanitarium vegie hot dog on the chopping board, it having been sliced into tiny circles. It was an interesting variation, it added a not-unwelcome hotdog flavour, though it is probably not a variation we'll add very often. Other variations of recent: diced eggplant, slices of tempeh.

Speaking of tempeh, I made five-spice tempeh and it was just like I remembered from our five-spice chicken days, so much so that D accidentally said, "I'm going to get more chicken." Recipe eventually, but no photos yet so you'll have to wait.

You can find my standard nasi goreng recipe here.

annie's bread stall, fremantle markets

Wandered down to Freo today to see MV Doulos, the floating bookstore. I love the idea of a ship that is a bookstore, sailing around the worlds bringing books and person-power to various countries. That's awesome! The bookstore itself was a bit average (and quite filled with books on Christianity), but it was, after all, a bookstore on a ship.

Popped by the markets to see if there was anything new and interesting (there wasn't). Passing by Annie's Bread Stall, we noticed a tiny sign indicating vegan pasties and samosas, and they were gigantic. We felt we had to try them, though we were full, so we saved them for later.

Having now eaten them for dinner (and our dinner now languishing in the fridge), they were pretty tasty! The flavour of the samosa in particular was pretty good. The pasty was a little too spinachy and unexpectedly mushroomy, but still good! And it's always lovely to find the surprise of random vegan food when out and about.

a new lentil pie recipe

Every four weeks or so I have to trot on out to uni for a three hour lecture that finishes about 20:30. By the time I get home I'm usually quite hungry, so D is left to prepare a hearty dinner that's going to be filling but won't weigh me down two hours before bedtime.

Last night's lecture ended spectacularly early, it being the last of the semester, so when I get home D was still admist the preparations and somehow I ended up finishing cooking dinner, which was very tricky on D's part!

It was an adaption of this recipe, but I think ours was probably more awesome, or certainly more to D's taste (D dislikes parsnips and celery). I think what makes this pie really tasty is cooking the lentils in stock, they soak up that extra delicious flavour.

I've posted a lentil pie recipe here before, but where that one was more like a dahl lentil pie, this is more like a lentil shepherd's pie.

Lentil Pie

ingredients:
two or three sweet potatoes
1 cup lentils (I think D used a combination of red and yellow)
1 onion (diced)
a dozen mushrooms (sliced)
1 carrot (diced)
1 tbl tomato paste
2 bay leaves
some stock
rosemary
garlic (minced)
pepper
3 tomatoes (diced)
1 tbl light soy sauce
2 or 3 tbl pumpkin seeds


method

Simmer the lentils in a few cups of stock for about half an hour, forty-five minutes.

Fry the carrots and the onion until carrot starts to soften. Add garlic, followed by mushrooms. Fry until looking delicious, then add tomatoes and cook until the tomatoes just start to go mushy. Drain the lentils and add, along with pepper, soy sauce, pumpkin seeds, bay leaves, tomato paste and rosemary. Leave to simmer for five minutes.

In the meantime boil and mash the potatoes in whatever is your preferred method.

Divide in to four ramekins, top with sweet potato, bake at 200C for 20 minutes.

perth loves earth, perth esplanade

The Perth Loves Earth Festival was held at the Perth Esplanade on Saturday. It was a day filled with intermittant rain, so the turnout was a bit low. There weren't a huge amount of stalls, just the ones you'd expect: PAWS, ARA, PACAT, Sea Sheppard. The food stalls were all shop-based, the Krishnas, Soul Tree and One World Cuisine. The highlight was a random little stall that was selling home-made vegan cakes and bikkies. The carrot cake was fantastic, we even took a couple of pieces home.





We've been meaning to trek up to Soul Tree for a while now, but have yet to wander up there. They were selling burgers, and they were incredibly tasty. We're thinking of making a day trip up the hill one day soon, perhaps going for a wander through John Forrest National Park (which is quite close by).




I wasn't sure going in what the festival was going to be like. It was interesting to have a poke around, and I firmly believe in the ideal behind it, that vegetarianism is essential to environmental sustainability, but I didn't learn anything new. The festival itself was mostly just attended by hippies, and spoken word poetry is not the way to reach out to people who aren't already living the lifestyle.

There's a sustainability fair being held this coming Sunday in Floreat, and I'm pretty confident it will go too far the other way, though - it will be all about PV and alternate energies rather than changing your life. I'll still go, in the hopes that I'll be pleasantly surprised, but I don't expect to get any delicious vegan cakes, for starters.

dusit thai, northbridge

Having heard such good things about Dusit Thai, but having never been, I crafted an opportunity on Sunday night to visit there.



The vegetarian menu is located in the back of the menu book, there are quite a few options and the waitstaff assured me that the noodles and things had no egg at all, which was grand. Still, I went with a hot green curry, hoping to stay healthy in the face of my very busy week to come (it was indeed very busy, and I did not fall ill, unlike D).

The curry was indeed quite hot, as advised, and I shared it and the popiah with Grahame in exchange for some of his noodles (which were tasty, too). The curry was fantastic, and I love a good fried popiah, though steamed are still the tastiest.

The items were a tad pricy, about $20.00 for the curry, but I was very happy with the meal and the service was pretty good. I can see why I have heard a lot about Dusit Thai.




Dusit Thai Restaurant
249 James Street
Northbridge

more from vegan indulgence

I thought I'd best save them up, instead of posting them one by one.




Tried the passionfruit melting moments (p. 34). I managed to get closer to the suggested twenty melting moments this time. I also had a surplus of filling, which I later used to pad out the topping for the orange and figsultana slice. The passionfruit filling was a lot less stiff than the chocolate one, which is something to remember for the future - it made putting the cookies together that little bit difficult. I used all gluten-free ingredients for this one, and they all subbed in just fine.




My parents live out in the Swan Valley, so whenever they leave their house they have to drive past orchards and fields of trees and vines and things. All year round they provide us with fruit and vegetables fresh from that morning, and I'll sometimes hold off on buying fruit and veges because the stuff they can buy is so much tastier than the stuff from Coles. Last week my parents turned up with a huge bag of oranges, the last of the season, and I started wondering what I could do with them. So I thought I'd give the orange and fig slice (p. 32) a go. Didn't have any fig, so used sultanas, and the oranges I've got right now are perfect, they're juicy with thick skin and no seeds. Fantastic! End result is this not-slice - didn't really have the heaviness of a slice, looked and felt more like a flat cake, but no complaints, because it is delicious all the same.




Friends over for dinner last night (post to follow), so in between making the soup and starting the main course I baked the choc cherry squares (p. 16). I didn't have any cherries but I did have some fresh strawberries, so I cut them up tiny and used them instead. Similarly, had no chocolate pieces so I subbed for gigantic squares of chocolate that I'd tried to smash up, with varying success. I found that the baking time was a bit shorter than suggested, 32 minutes rather than 40. Still, end product was super tasty, we had it after we broke from playing mahjong.



I love this book, it's great. I realised I hadn't linked to it in any of my previous posts, but you can buy it online from aduki press here.

moon festival

As a child, on moon festival my house was filled with people and our tables were laden down with food. I remember our procession, a line of little children of varying heights, our tummies full and our lanterns lit and carefully held before us. We paraded around my parents’ property line, around the back and down the side until we came full circle, our lanterns held for the moon to see. Afterwards, there’d be more food, and perhaps some sulking if a lantern had caught fire. I went through so many lanterns this way, burning little holes in the cellophane of my butterfly (it was always a butterfly), but it was okay, because there would always be next year’s lantern.



It has been years since I celebrated Moon Festival, but I really wanted to celebrate it this year, so as the fifteen moon of the eighth lunar month approached I invited a dozen friends around and D and I spent a day in preparation, cleaning and cooking and buying new outdoor furniture.

I was rushing around, cooking things, and D was flitting about chatting with people, so neither of us had a chance to take any photos of the food. I’ll probably put up some of the recipes for these eventually. There are no specific foods that are served at Moon Festival – the emphasis is just on the having of food, its abundance, and the sharing of it with your friends.

On the table: laksa, lontong, gado gado, satay mushrooms, char kuay teow, nasi goreng, chickpea rogan josh, potato rendang, yao chao guai and gai lan in a garlic soy sauce. After dinner snacks were passion fruit melting moments, mooncake, oreos and kuih bangkit.

It was so delightful being able to share this with my friends, even though most of them only knew what google could tell them about it.

vitamilk: not suitable for vegans

I have been drinking soy milk for quite some time. For most of my life before I became vegan, it was my milk of choice. My favourite has long been the Yeo's soy milk. I know that some people don't like how sweet it is, and that's what lead to its 'now with less sugar' rebranding, but I have quite strong brand loyalty for Yeo's, it's what my mum buys when she's buying popper packs of soy milk and chrysanthemum tea, and I love it.

My least favourite has been vitamilk, since that fateful day four years ago when I was sitting in Sparrow's, eating a perfectly delightful satay and lontong (not vegan), and it was the most disgusting soy milk I'd ever tasted. The texture was awful, the flavour was not pleasant at all, and I didn't finish it. Since then, I have been suspicious of any soy milk in a similarly shaped bottle, irrational but still a suspicion.

D and I were served vitamilk at a restaurant this evening. I frowned, but was resigned, and I had it in my mouth when D said "it has milk!" I felt disappointed and guilty and a little astonished, and my mother's displeasure at the idea of anything other than sugar and soybeans in soya milk was clear. The bottles were open, if we sent them back (we didn't, but we didn't drink them) they would be wasted but there on the front under the brand it was clearly printed, 1% whole milk solids.

At least now, my mother said, you know why it has always been your least favourite.

choc melting moments from vegan indulgence

These are really tasty. Sadly, I didn't manage to make the batter stretch to the full twenty that I was hoping for, so I am going to try the passionfruit ones tonight, with gluten-free flour for my gluten-free friends.

shepherd's pie

I posted the recipe for this pie some years ago in my old food blog, but I made it again last night and thought I’d post it up here.


Shepherd's Pie



This is a great pie for hiding things in. It’s so chunky, an extra ingredient is easy to slip in. It’s not necessarily going to hide the shape of the mushrooms, since mushrooms are pretty obvious, but it helps to hide the flavour and texture, if your aversion to mushrooms is, like mine was, solely texture based.

When we first went vegetarian, D declared that I had to learn to eat a lot of the dreaded mushrooms, and having recipes that made it easy to disguise the flavour really helped. And now I really like mushrooms!


ingredients

1 can kidney beans (drained)
handful of mushrooms
one tomato
half cup stock or wine
one carrot
half cup of peas
half capsicum
half an onion
chives
parsley
chilli flakes
pepper
one garlic clove
tomato sauce
four potatoes


method

Dice the carrot, onion, tomato and capsicum. Fry the onion in some olive oil with the chilli flakes, pepper, parsley, chives and a squirt of tomato sauce until the onion is translucent. Mince the garlic and fry, then add the carrot, capsicum and tomato, as well as the stock or wine. You may not need the whole half cup, though. After the tomato renders down a bit, add the mushrooms (diced or cut small) and the kidney beans. Allow the liquid to evaporate a little, then add the peas and heat through. Spoon filling into an oven dish.

In the meantime, prepare the potatoes for mashing. I like to boil them with some garlic, and mash with a little nuttelex. Spread the mashed potatoes over the top of the filling, then brush or drizzle a little olive oil.

Bake for ten minutes at 190C.

raspberry choc mud cake

I got home from work on Tuesday to find Vegan Indulgence sitting atop my computer. It was published by Aduki just in August, and I only heard of it on Tuesday - it was Davyd, in this instance, whose vegan finger was on the pulse. The book looks fantastic. It's a tiny thing, $11.95 only, filled with things that look rich and delicious.

The raspberry choc mud cake was indeed, as expected, rich and delicious. I've been cutting the tiniest pieces, and still going in to some sort of temporary sugar overload.

This was my first attempt at a layered cake, and as you can see from the photo above it was a very messy experience. I think it would help if I had a spring-form pan, which I could then wrap around as I worked up the layers. But messy or not, it was still a tasty outcome (ie, cake).

Other things that look great: black forest cake, passionfruit melting moments, orange and fig slice.