Mofo Day 5 Best Sandwich Ever

I went to Budapest last October to visit a friend who was teaching abroad and I discovered just how good pickled everything was, it was the first time I'd ever tried sauerkraut and it's the best way I've ever eaten cabbage.

Since then I have been thinking I should try a Reuben and a few weeks back we were in in Brighton and I picked up some smoked Violife so why would I not combine the two things.


I whipped up a little sriracha mayo and steamed myself some of the pastrami from vegan diner and I was ready to go.

Since everything is better when it's all hot and melty I went down the grilled cheese route. It was toasty, tangy and delicious. It was just a shame that I had to use white bread, rye bread goes moldy really quickly.

 

Mofo Day 4: Tell Us About a Weird Food Combo That You Love.

I used to eat some weird things in my younger days, I remember dipping crisps in yoghurt and enjoying it. But there's nothing these days that I eat that's an odd combo. I do however have a secret recipe for BBQ sauce with an odd ingredient.

One of these things is not like the others.

It seems very wrong but it's oh so right and once they all simmer up together you get the most magical, spicy, sweet BBQ sauce. All thanks to the magic of Dr pepper.

I'll be using the sauce a bit later in the month so you'll get to see it properly in all its sticky glory and I will of course cover my face in it.

Quick, Easy and Delicious

I work for a company who supply software to schools so September is a tiny little bit manic. My boss laughed at me today when I said I was trying to complete some kind of extra curricular activity and I might have come very close to shushing a customer.

This all means that today's theme is totally perfect, the faster and more easily I can feed myself the less likely I am to throw in the towel and live on crackers for thirty days. It's a legitimate concern, I have a small obsession with Jacobs cream crackers.

Itame seemed like the perfect solution, I was only recently introduced to wagamamas and this coconutty soup was so worth the splash zone. It's tasty and fresh and as I discovered when I got home to our sad little city, very simple to make.

It starts off with some garlic and ginger, grated will do fine, then a couple of generous spoonfuls of green thai curry paste, this sizzles in a little oil til fragrant and lovely.

Then I add a can of coconut milk and about a can and a half of stock, I'm very anti washing up, and simmer that while I chop the veg. I threw in strips of pepper and red onion and let them cook for a couple of minutes while I chopped up some pak choi and poured some boiling water over rice noodles.

Into the soup goes that pak choi and the noodles are drained and submerged in cold water, I add some lime juice and some coriander to the soup and then pour it over the noodles in a big bowl.

All that was left to do was to slurp my soup and splatter my self and surroundings with soup.
 

Recreate a Meal From Your Childhood

When I was growing up we didn't have a lot of money, my parents had a lot of bad luck and things were a bit tight. But it never felt like it, Mam worked really hard to make sure we were fed. She was a brilliant cook and her cakes were out of this world, she made fresh scones and we had good, solid, thoroughly northern pastry based meals.

That's not to say she didn't have a much larger repertoire but dad liked stodge. And growing up so did I. One of my favourite things was steak and kidney stew with dumplings. She made fabulous dumplings.

Now, this is not remotely vegan and there's something about offal that looking back I don't really miss but warm, beefy stew is definitely something I want to eat regularly. So, I needed to do a little work to recreate her stew in an appealing way. The first and most obvious choice was mushrooms, when quartered chestnut mushrooms look like kidneys but taste much nicer. Then I decided that TVP chunks would work nicely for the cheap stewing steak she used to use.

I threw together a nice rich stock, a bit of "beef" stock, some marmite, soy sauce and miso and it was dark and luscious. I used that to re hydrate the TVP and strained it off to use in the stew. Then I fried a large onion til brown and soft before adding my mushrooms and TVP chunks.

Into that went a little corn flour and then my strained stock and I left that simmering away nicely. I don't have the first clue how to make dumplings with suet, not even the vegetable based stuff so I decided to use the recipe from Isa Does It from the rosemary stew and added thyme rather than rosemary.

In went the dumplings and I whipped up some broccoli mashed potatoes and some grated carrot with black pepper. I thought I did a bloody good job replicating the taste and Mam was very impressed by the dumplings so I'm more than happy with that

Stew however is not pretty, even with lovely orange veg.

Rise and Shine! It’s MoFo time!

On week days I eat the same breakfast almost every day, I have microwave porridge made with soy milk and a banana, I don't even have a coffee until I get to work.

But I enjoy making a proper breakfast on the weekends and after a conversation with The Boy about how to correctly cook scrambled eggs, Hint; it is not in the microwave, I got a real craving for them. I like a tofu scramble as much as the next girl but it's a different and generally more flavourful experience.

I wanted that rich, eggy, slightly runny breakfast dish just like mum used to make and I didn't have firm tofu, just silken.But, that works for scramble in a pinch and I've been loving chickpea pancakes, which are beautifully eggy so a plan came together.

I mixed about a tablespoon of chickpea flour with about half a cup of soymilk, a couple of tablespoons of nutritional yeast and a generous pinch of black salt together in a jug while I broke up a packet of silken tofu into tiny pieces in a hot dry sauce pan. Then I poured my mixture over the top of the tofu and cooked it til then whole thing thicken up enough to look just like scrambled eggs.

I served it up with all the usual suspects, some tempeh bacon, mushrooms, beans, grilled tomatoes, a seitan sausage that was hanging around and some toast. It tasted like I remember scrambled eggs tasting, it got The Experts approval and The Boy told me he prefers proper scrambled 'fu or rubbery eggs. I'm not sure how to take that but I loved it.

It was so authentic it welded itself to the pan, just like when I used to scramble actual eggs. None of the cruelty but all the mess.

Putting Birthday Presents to Good Use

A friend and I have this tradition of getting each other very belated birthday gifts, usually when one or the other of us decides there's something we would really like. I recently cashed mine in; there were a couple of cookbooks I was very excited about owning and I'm on a shopping for myself ban.

I requested Vegan Richa's Indian Kitchen and The Homemade Vegan Pantry which is Miyoko Schinner's latest book. They duly arrived and they are gorgeous, they're both stunning books with beautiful pictures and I am so exciting about working through both of them and documenting it here.

I started with Vegan Richa's Indian Kitchen, I'm a touch intimidated by Vegan Pantry and I have been craving a good curry for a while now. It took me three thorough readings of the book to decide what I wanted to make, everything looks so tasty and nothing seemed complicated or time consuming.

The first thing I had to try was the naan bread, it's something I love and my local shop used to do a very nice vegan one but they stopped selling it a few months back and I have been left bereft of the rare and elusive vegan naan bread. I decided on the avocado naan because they're green and I love me some funny coloured food.

They were very simple to make, they took a couple of hours to make but it was almost all down time and making bread makes me feel like a culinary genius. I decided to do them in the frying pan and they got appealingly toasty. 

I needed something to eat my naan with and the cumin scented rice and broccoli kofta with yoghurt gravy sounded like just the thing. I am horrible at cooking rice, it terrifies me but this recipe was so detailed I felt confident and was so pleased with the results, I had fragrant and fluffy rice.

The koftas were simple and although I think I left the yoghurt gravy too thick the resulting dish was flavourful and thoroughly impressed The Boy. I've also never received more compliments or questions about my lunch when I took the leftovers to work.

Disclaimer: The names of recipes might be misremembered or otherwise mangled and there is no natural light in my house so excuse the clumsy photo and naughty tortie in the background of this picture.

I cannot wait to make more from this cook book, I think it's going to become one of my most regularly used books. Just need to brave Vegan Pantry now, does anyone have any recommendations?

A Little Bit of TLC

The Boy has this very expensive hobby that takes him all over the country and occasionally as far as mainland Europe. This weekend it took him to Brighton and I tagged along for the ride. I fully intended to take lots of lovely photographs of the food but I failed miserably and forgot to take any at all.

Suffice to say we had a lovely weekend, I ate a lot of very nice vegan food and we are a little bit worse for wear after a weekend in a tent.

Since we are a bit worn and the weather is cooling down it only seemed right to make a big pan of soup. Which is all well and good but this whole Boy business is still new enough that I'm trying my best to impress in the kitchen and a couple of slices of bread lacked imagination.

So I googled Soda Farls, they always look delish but they're traditionally made with buttermilk. This is an easy sub though, some soy milk and vingear and I had some "buttermilk" and then some soda farls shortly thereafter.

Here they are cooking up in a dry frying pan.

And fancying up my soup, with a little vitalite.

I think I impressed and I don't think I'll be buying bread rolls to eat with soup ever again.

Grown Up Grilled Cheese

I was one of those vegetarians, you know the ones; they could never give up cheese. But then I gave it up and I discovered I didn't miss the stuff in the slightest. Sometimes I want something salty or creamy but I'm pretty happy with what can be done with avocado, cashews and nooch. I don't miss cheese.

I also don't particularly like shop bought vegan cheese, most of it is a bit uninspiring and I'd rather make a sauce or some cashew ricotta. There are a couple of notable exceptions; I used to love Vbites bacon cheddar, that was magical and I would happily eat that stuff uncooked.

Then everyone starts talking about violife, it's great, it melts, you can buy it in Tesco and I'm a sucker for hype so off I toddle and get some. I'm a bit late to the party but I can totally see why it got people so excited; it's bloody good stuff. I've even had positive reviews from the two omnis I've been kind enough to share it with. I've been mostly consuming it in sandwiches; grilled ones.

So, tonight I caramelised some onions.

Then I got my "cheese" ready

And assembled my sandwich with the violife, some of my onions and some black olives and grilled the little beauty until it was toasty and the cheese was all melted. I ate it with some spicy potato salad because carbs. 

The boy was quite impressed overall and I even shared my onions with him.

Muddling through

So what exactly do you write in your first ever blog post?

I think the first thing should be an admission that I pushed myself to start this because I wanted to take part in vegan Mofo this year. I have enjoyed Mofo for a number of years from behind my computer screen and I love the imagination and fabulous creativity that the online vegan community bring every year and I think that I should try jumping in and taking part.

I am so pleased to be a part of this movement, there is such a sense of innovation and fearless experimentation. Although I made the decision to stop eating animal products because the cruelty was something I didn't want to support I never expected to find a passion for cooking and a hobby which brought me so much pleasure.

When I moved out and had my own kitchen and responsibility to feed myself I knew how to make maybe three things, I now have a groaning shelf full of amazing cookbooks, a ridiculous wishlist of more besides and consider myself to be a very good cook and fantastic baketivist. All thanks to my desire to live off of something more than plain pasta.

Vegan food and the people who make it are changing the world and we are changing peoples minds. Not eating animal products has enabled and encouraged me to try things I would never have and I am constantly stunned and excited by the things I see other people creating. And I sleep soundly knowing I live an authentic life and I'm not hurting anything to do it.

That's probably enough of me rambling on, I'll see about getting a post that actually contains some food up in the coming week, til then I'll leave you with a picture of somebunny who appreciates cauliflower leaves and other kitchen cast offs.