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.