Snow is fallin' all around me....

.... OK the snowing stopped, but you gotta love a bit of Shaky at Chrimbo!

It's Christmas Eve - YAAAAAYYYYYYYYYYYY!!!! I love Christmas and I'm in the process of making the food for tonight and getting the flat ready for my friends to come round before we go out!

So onto the food pics. I dug out my battered old breville sandwich toaster the other day to make this awesome sarnie, I called it pizza toasted sarnie, because it really was pizza-y! That's mozarella cheezly, tomatoes, black pepper and dried oregano. YUMMO.


Gooey cheezly - the only way I can eat vegan cheese - melted to oblivion!

I believe I mentioned cupcakes last time.... here they are. My best friend's husband turned 30 this week so I made these to celebrate. VCTOtW Golden Vanilla cupcakes that I added some chocolate chips and a bit of mint extract to. The icing is just a basic chocolate buttercream that I also added mint extract to.

And here - more cheezly. This was disgustingly trashy and freakin awesome. I made mac & noochy cheeze sauce then put some breadcrumbs on top and put it under the grill a few minutes. Then I added some bacos and cheezly and gave a couple more minutes under the grill. Trashy comfort food at it's best.

This was gonna be dinner for me and my friends on monday but they both got stuck in those ridiculous traffic jams coming home from work and didn't get to mine at all, so I had leftovers the next day. It was these nuggets that I made from black eyed beans and barley then coated in cornmeal and fried (probably what gave me acid reflux attack - haha oops!). I'm working on the recipe still and I'm going to bake them next time to be safe, but they were almost there.

The next day was pretty miserable because of the afore-mentioned acid reflux pain. All I could face cooking and eating was soup, so I chunked up an onion, a big parsnip and about 5 big carrots, the stalks of a bunch of coriander leaves and cooked them in stock for 20 mins. Then I added some soymilk and the leaves of the coriander and blended. It was yummy.

And a sneak peak of tonight's xmas eve foodz - peanut butter krispie balls (hee hee). There's tonnes of recipes out there and someone put some they'd made on their blog last week (I've forgotten who and didn't bookmark it so whoever you are - sorry!) and they looked so good I knew I had to have a go. So I mixed up peanut butter, rice krispies and some other stuff and rolled into balls (hee hee) then put a big old blob of melted choccie on top. I'll post the recipe next time.

I've also got some fudge in the fridge that doesn't appear to be setting up, even though I followed the recipe to a T! if it hasn't set in the next hour I'm going to have to try and salvage it - will report back next time!!

So as Shaky says "ooooh ooooooooh oooooh ooooh oooh oooooohh - shooby dooby dooby doo wop....!" Wait no sorry, "I mean Merry Christmas Everyone!!" and I'll see ya in 2010!

Laterz
xXx

The first one of 2009

HAPPY NEW YEAR!!! I can't believe it's 2009 already. I trust everyone had a good NY's Eve? Mine was a bit lame but it was nice to be with my friends.

Midnight also marked my one year veganniversary! A whole year of being vegan and I've loved every second of it! I decided I needed to bake something extra awesome to celebrate - more on that in a bit though, I have a couple of food pics....

Yesterday's brekkie, pancakes with lots of cinnamon added to the batter and maple syrup.

Today's dinner. It is rare that I fancy salad but today I did. I made the country fried tofu from Hot Damn & Hell Yeah (that stuff is awesome) and a salad out of chinese leaf, mushrooms, cucumber, carrots and a simple vinaigrette.

And now the important stuff - the baking. I wanted to use some of the white chocolate I got for christmas and some peanut butter so I made blondies. I got the idea for swirling peanut butter into brownies from the Barefoot Contessa! But this is my veganified version. They are a bit more effort than regular blondies, but I don't apologise for that, cuz they are tasty as fook!

White Chocolate Peanut Butter Swirl Blondies

Dry Ingredients:

1½ cups/240g plain flour
¼ cup/4 tbsp cornflour
1 tsp baking powder

½ tsp baking soda

¼ tsp salt

Wet Ingredients:

1 cup/250ml unsweetened non-dairy milk
1 tsp vinegar
¾ cup (packed)/135g light brown muscovado sugar

2 flax eggs (2 tbsp ground flax seeds whisked with 6 tbsp cold water)

½ cup/125ml soya yoghurt

¼ cup/60ml sunflower or rapeseed (canola) oil

1½ tsp vanilla extract

Extras:

30g/about ¼ cup vegan white chocolate, chopped or chips

1/3 cup/6 heaped tbsp natural smooth peanut butter
1 heaped tsp cocoa powder

Method:

Preheat the oven to 180°C/350°F/Gas 4.

Mix together the milk and vinegar and set aside. Whisk together flax seeds and water and set aside.

Seive together the dry ingredients and mix well. Whisk the rest of the wet ingredients into the milk mixture and then add the flax eggs and whisk thoroughly - don't combine the two just yet.

If need be, stir the oils back into the peanut butter and if it's not soft enough to drop off the spoon in blobs* then heat it very gently over a low flame, stirring until it softens a little.

Pour the wet ingredients into the dry and mix well until just combined, don't overmix. Remove 1/2 a cup of the blondie batter and put into a small bowl. Mix the cocoa powder in and set aside.

Toss the chocolate chips in a tsp or so of flour and then fold them into the batter and pour into a lightly oiled 8x8 baking tin. Then drop blobs of the chocolate batter and peanut butter over the surface. Like this.....

Then take a skewer and swirl swirly swirl...

Bake until the blondies are raised and cracked on top and a skewer comes out still a bit soft. It took 25 minutes in my oven. Leave it to cool in the tin and then I used a spatula to cut the blondies into 12 and remove them from the tin to cool on a wire rack. Here they are straight out the oven....

*sorry for shit description!! hehe

Cooking to: Heroes Series 2 - I'm catching up so I can start watching S3 that I've been V+ing.

Trashy Foodz

I did a little baking this weekend, but more on that in a bit. Mostly I have eaten trash this week so I think a week of salads and stir fries awaits me!

The day after my last post, I cooked up the remainder of the ribz and this time did them in a regular non-stick frying pan and they worked MUCH better. I just served them with some greens sauted with spring onion and garlic. mmmm.


For lunch on Thursday & Friday, I made some spicy carrot soup. I know it's still technically summer (for about 3 more hours anyway) but the weather in this country sucks so I decided on soup instead of salad. Please don't laugh at my rubbish effort of a chef-y (read: tossy!) swirl of soya cream on top! I went a bit trigger happy on the pepper so it was a tad over-spicy but when I get it right, I'll post the recipe.


Friday's dinner, I was in the mood for some trash! So I cooked up some Hot Damn & Hell Yeah's Country Fried Tofu (although I think the original recipe has breadcrumbs and mine didn't), with some chipped potatoes baked with sea salt, thyme, olive oil and paprika and some mushy peas.


So onto the baking then. My friend celebrated her birthday yesterday and she requested bran muffins (most people want cupcakes, but noooo) and bran muffins she got. We even stuck a candle in it, lit it an sang happy birthday! I used this recipe but I added 2 defrosted frozen bananas to the wet ingredients as well.

But what kind of friend would I be if I only provided healthy snacks for a birthday? The type the other guests would not be best pleased with! So I made VCTOtW basic vanilla cupcakes and I came up with a new peanut butter/choc frosting recipe. I wanted something soft enough to spread, not pipe and not be sickly sweet like butter cream and this came out perfect! huzzah.....

....only there was way too much of it for 12 cupcakes! So what to do with the rest? Make another batch of golden vanilla batter, pour it in a sheet tin and make one big choc/pb cake to take to work tomorrow. Good plan.


I didn't take pictures of the rest of the food, but I also made a couple of salads and a tofu dish to go with the potato wedges and mushrooms that my friend bought (and some disgusting processed chicken things and fishcakes for the omnis).

When I got home today, I wanted something quick so I cooked up some tofu in barbecue sauce, put it on a ciabatta roll with a tofutti slice and some gherkin and it rocked! TRASH!

For dinner, I had another go at veggie hash. Potatoes, sweet potatoes, onion, red pepper, mushrooms & peas. YUM!

That's all folks.

Cooking to: (Cupcakes) Matchbox 20 - Mad Season / (today's dinner) DVD: Season 2 of Alias

Whew! Spicy.

The good thing about Sundays are that you have extra time to make something awesome! So I decided that I would try my hand at a tagine style stew and it turned out really well. I made some lemon couscous to go with it.

Edited recipe is at the end of this post - I forgot the chickpeas and added extra chilli which made it realllllly hot. I added the chickpeas in when I reheated it for dinner last night and they definitely belong in there!!


For dessert, I had some puff pastry that I defrosted that needed using up so I came up with these. Basically I just cut the pastry into rounds and bake at 180°C for about 20 minutes until they are lightly golden. Then I filled them with some rosewater pastry creme (recipe from VCTOTW, I just replaced the vanilla extract with rosewater). On the top I just mixed some icing sugar and rosewater together until it was a runny paste, drizzled it on top then sprinkled on some smashed up pistachios. These were tasty but MESSY! Luckily I live alone!

What to do with the leftover pastry? hmmm. I know, roll it out, fill it full of peanut butter and chocolate chips and bake it along with the pastry circles! Excellent with a cup of tea - 70's Animal agrees!

As promised, the recipe for the tagine-esque stew. It feels wrong calling it a tagine as, a) it was cooked in a crockpot and b) I don't really have any idea what should be in a tagine. So forgive the shite name and I give you...

Moroccan Inspired Veggie Stew
Ingredients:
1 small onion
Tbsp or so of olive oil
3 or 4 carrots (dep. on size – I used 4 small ones)
½ a large aubergine / eggplant
¼ small butternut squash
1 medium sweet potato
1 red pepper
1 can (400g) chick peas
500ml (2 cups) veg stock or water (in my case water from a kettle and 2 tbsp of oxo veggie stock concentrate!)
2 tbsp harissa (you can alter this to lower / raise the heat – if you don’t like spicy, start with one and add more later if it needs it!)
1 tsp ground cumin
½ tsp cinnamon or a cin. stick
¼ tsp ground coriander
¼ tsp smoked paprika
A 500g box of creamed tomatoes or passata (you can use a tin of tomatoes and just blend them if you don’t have passata)
2 bay dried leaves
Salt & pepper to taste
Juice of half a lemon
Small handful of fresh coriander, roughly chopped

Couscous ingredients:
1 cup dried couscous
250ml / 1 cup hot veg stock or water
1 tbsp olive oil
1-2 tbsp fresh lemon juice
Salt & pepper to taste
4 tbsp / ¼ cup sultanas
4 tbsp / ¼ cup pine nuts

Method:
While you prepare the veg, turn the crockpot on high and add the olive oil.

Peel and chunk up the sweet potato, squash, carrots and onions into large dice. Cut the pepper and aubergine the same sort of size.

Add the onion to the olive oil and stir around then add the rest of the veg, except the chick peas.

Veggies in the pot - I took a pic cuz they were so pretty and colourful!

Mix the harissa and spices into the stock and add to the crock, with the bay leaves and tomatoes and a good pinch of salt and pepper.

Turn the crock down to low, cover and cook for 8 hours. Stir every now and then. When there’s an hour or so left of cooking time, check for seasoning and heat. Add some chilli flakes if needed and adjust seasoning (this needs quite a bit of salt I found, but then I like lots of seasoning!)

To make the couscous, mix together all the ingredients, except the pine nuts, in a bowl and cover with a plate. Set aside for at least 5 minutes. Toast the pine nuts in a dry non stick pan, over a med-high heat for a few minutes until golden and toasty. Keep your eye on them – they go quick!

Fork through the couscous (don’t use a spoon or it’ll get claggy) and then mix in the pine nuts (I like to reserve a few to sprinkle on top).

This will easily feed 4 people but tastes great reheated the next day as well!

Cooking to: Weezer – Pinkerton

Short & Sweet

I don't have much for you today, just a couple of stickies. I will in be in London monday - friday for the next two weeks on a course and will be staying in a hotel so 2 weeks of pasta and tomato sauce probably await me! :(

Next weekend I'll be making up for it no doubt!

So anyway, here are some cupcakes I made for a workmate's birthday. Chocolate peanut butter CCs and lemon CCs. Unfortunately, I decided to use a straight piping nozzle for the PB frosting and they look a little like poop! ah well, they tasted nice which is what matters!

I also made some peanut butter cookies. I know there's a zillion pb cookie recipes out there, but I wanted to make my own version up. It's good, but not quite right so I need to work on perfecting it a bit before I'm happy to share it.

Cooking to: Bon Jovi - 7800° Fahrenheit & Incubus - A Crow Left of the Murder (cakes) / Van Halen - 1984 (cookies)

You like me, you really like me...!

I’d like to thank the academy....

Was that predictable? I think it was. Ah well I don’t care! I am so excited, my little fledgling bloglet has won an award – courtesy of the lovely Jessy at happyveganface.

I think her blog is fab so I’m really flattered that she nominated me as one of her picks. She has been very supportive and often leaves me really sweet comments so a big thank you to you Jessy!

So here are the rules....

* put the logo on your blog.
* add a link to the person who awarded you.
* nominate seven other blogs.
* add links to those blogs on your blog.
* leave a message for your nominee on their blogs.

And here are my nominations – glamourous assistant, the envelope please....

1. Vegan.Chicks.Rock - I couldn’t agree more!
2. Chocolate Covered Vegan
3. Could it be seitan?
4. Indian Vegetarian Kitchen
5. Destiny’s Vegan Kitchen
6. Comfort Food Vegan
7. Megatarian

Ok and because I’m in a good mood, some food pics and a recipe. Firstly, I reworked my banana muffin recipe to make it wheat-free and also because I had to because I didn’t quite have the right ingredients. I actually preferred these to the regular ones, the texture is better and they are more peanut buttery.


So here is the tweaked recipe:

Banana Peanut Butter Spelt Muffins

Wet ingredients:
2 ripe bananas (mine were frozen and just defrosted in the morning, but fresh are better)
125ml / ½ cup soy yoghurt
125ml / ½ cup soymilk (or other non-dairy milk)
4 tbsp / ¼ cup crunchy peanut butter
60ml / ¼ cup sunflower oil
1 tsp vanilla extract
Dry ingredients:
320g / 2 cups spelt flour
1 cup sugar (I know a lot of bakers add this in with the wet but I put it in with the dry to make mixing easier)
1 tsp salt
1 tsp baking soda

Method:
Preheat the oven to 180°C / 350°F.

In a jug, mash together the bananas and whisk in the rest of the wet ingredients.

In a large bowl stir together the dry ingredients. Pour the wet ingredients in and mix well. Line a muffin pan with muffin cases and fill them half way with the mixture. Bake until a knife comes out clean (about 20-30 mins depending on your oven).

Note: I got 8 muffins out of this mixture, but as you can see they were HUGE! That’s because I filled them 2/3 full, like I always do with muffins, but these rose more than normal, so only fill them half way up.

Cooking to: Audioslave – Out of Exile


A couple of other shots as well. I been trying to make sure I get my dark green veg every day and surprisingly really enjoying it.

I have also discovered my favourite new vegetable side dish: blanche some greens (sugar snap peas and string beans work especially well), just for a couple of minutes then plunge them into ice water. Then sauté a small onion or shallot (finely diced) in a little bit of olive oil. When it’s browned add the greens, grate in a clove of garlic and a bit of salt & pepper and just cook it till the veg are warmed through. This keeps them really crispy and delicious and blanching / shocking in cold water keeps them beautifully vibrant green. Perfect!

So here’s two pics of meals with the aforementioned veg:

This one was my favourite! I roasted some onions, red pepper and tomatoes in a little olive oil and some balsamic vinegar, then added some of Julie Hassons’ awesome Italian spicy sausage for the last 5-10 minutes of baking. I served some brown rice along with it, that I just tipped into the tray once I took out the veggies and mixed around to get some of the balsamicy veggie juices to coat the rice. By the way, if you’ve not made these sausages yet – try them! They freeze really well so even if you can’t eat them all in a few days it’s ok. And they’re a great recipe that is quite easy to tweak if you don’t like spicy / garlic … etc. They’re just awesome.


This was just some plain old baked tofu. But the potato wedges, now they were delicious. I baked them for almost an hour in total at 180°C (with a little olive oil, a sprinkling of paprika and sea salt) and they were perfectly crispy and soft in the middle.


And this was just some veggies, tinned tomatoes, chilli and pasta – a really quick dinner.

I <3 free stuff. And tofu.

I won a prize draw! That never happens to me, I never win anything. But I won a box of Retro Lush stuff. I scored a shower gel (there were 2 but one wasn’t vegan, boo!), 2 soaps and 2 bath bombs. My flat smells good!! Here they are:

The box – I know it’s daft to post a pic of a box but it was cute:


The Swag:

But back to the important stuff: foodz. This was yesterday’s dinner – I re-attempted my idea of sesame mustard tofu and hurrah, it worked! I 86’d* the breadcrumbs and coated the marinated tofu with flour, mustard powder, salt & pepper and sesame seeds. I also baked it instead of frying it to make it healther. To go with it was balsamic roasted cherry tomatoes and red onions (SOOOO good!), fresh corn sauted in a bit of vegan margarine and olive oil and some spinach cooked in a teeny bit of veg stock.

Today, I went for a really simple stir fry of bok choi, peas, green beans, peppers, marinated tofu pieces and carrots with a splash of lime juice, soy, chilli sauce, agave and a grating of fresh ginger. To go with it I just did some noodles which I mixed some peanut sauce (recipe in this post) into and topped the whole lot off with some toasted sesame seeds. This was sooooo yummy! Oh and it took my peanut butter collection down to 4 jars!


(I don’t really know if I know exactly what 86’d means but Phoebe said it in Charmed once about a demon and I'm pretty sure it applies here!)


Cooking (today) to: Bloodhound Gang – Hefty Fine

Wakey Wakey, Flax Eggs & Bakey

Another day and yet another burn! That’s 2 more burns since my last post (1 a day! ) Oh and a bruise too. Seriously, I dunno what the cock is wrong with me lately - I’m gonna have to start wearing clothes with sleeves and oven mitts or something stupid like that if this carries on! Sheesh.

It’s not all doom and gloom though, I baked yesterday. Two experiments with flax eggs (see; the stupid title makes sense now): biccies and cakes.

First off, fairy cakes; I used to love making these when I was little and I just felt like creaming together butter and sugar, adding ‘eggs’ and making really childish cakes. So I experimented and this is what I got:


Erm, they sunk! So I am gonna have to work on the recipe before I can give it out as it’s not right yet. Maybe it’s because I ran out of baking powder and didn’t have quite enough! Hmmm. So instead of the butterfly cakes I had in mind, I decided to start a theme – IT’S PEANUT BUTTER JELLY TIME PEANUT BUTTER JELLY TIME..... ooh that dancing banana, I’m gonna hunt that little bitch down.

Anyhoo. I poked a hole in each cake, filled it with jam and then topped them with peanut butter frosting. They rock.

Money shot....

Secondly, I fancied jammie dodgers, but surprise surprise - they are not vegan. Well suck it mcvities (or whoever makes jammie dodgers), I shall make my own.

Ok so they’re not perfect (YET) and the second batch was overcooked, even though they were cooked the same temp / time! Weird. These are my peanut butter jammie dodgers, recipe pending tweakage.


Oh and yesterday morning’s brekkie. I wouldn’t normally bother posting a pic of a common old tofu scramble, but it was so pretty and colourful! I added fresh tomatoes and basil right before serving and roasted up some sweet potato to go with it – and it was good (it made me forget about the burn on my hand from digging out the bits of potato that fell through the oven door, for about 5 minutes anyway).

Yesterday was also the day I realised that I have 5 jars of peanut butter in my cupboard! FIVE! How messy is my cupboard! No wonder the bugger doesn't shut properly.

Cooking to: Def Leppard – Slang, Ash – Meltdown & Snow Patrol – Final Straw


Onto today and I felt like making some Singapore noodles. I only had tandoori curry powder so they weren’t quite right. Plus once the vermicelli pasta was cooked it looked more like spaghetti, but that’s cuz it really should be rice noodles not regular pasta! They were good though and I was so happy with the tofu, it was perfect in texture and colour and taste! I’m going to try this again with my own spice blend and rice noodles and then I’ll post the recipe.

Cooking to: A random iTunes playlist but this dinner was so quick, it only took about 4 songs!