Vegan MoFo: Bakin' hot

I told you there'd be baked goods and here they are!

I made my own bread - no packet mix this time and I'm so excited about it too. To tell the truth it's a bit sad how excited I am! I used this recipe, only I replaced the honey with agave and used 400g wholemeal bread flour and 100g white bread flour, instead of half & half - next time I might use all wholemeal. Also I followed the instructions on the side of the yeast jar to activate it before adding it to the flours.


I baked it for 25 minutes so it's still nice and soft and it rocked for dinner with some pasta.

My baking experiment didn't go exactly as I planned (more on that in a bit) so I made a crumble to use up the plums and strawberries in my fridge, before I go onsite on Tuesday. It rocked.

I cut up 4 plums and about a cup or so of strawberries....

Put into a dish and then rub 100g of vegan margarine into 150g of plain flour. Add 100g of oats, 70g of sugar and a pinch of salt. Then sprinkle it on top and bake in a preheated 190C oven for 45-60 mins (took 55 in my oven) until lightly browned.

I served with a splosh of soya cream but the leftovers will be eaten with custard tomorrow at my parents' house!

Onto the failure - my pecan toffee apple muffins. Well I say failure but they're not that bad. The flavour is awesome but the texture is wrong. I want to try these again really soon though because I think they have the potential for greatness! So recipe is pending tweakage.

I made these for part of the brunch I made for myself and my two friends this morning along with bran muffins, tofu scramble and roasted potatoes - that I stupidly didn't take pictures of!

Vegan MoFo: Saturday Night I feel the air is getting hot

Gah, I still remember the dance to that stupid song!

Well it's saturday night and I'm sitting on my couch watching Harold & Kumar. It's sad isn't it.

But it's the weekend - hurray - and I intended to start it off with french toast, but there was a problem with that plan - I had no bread. So pancakes it was instead. With maple syrup and some mango sauce which was just some tinned mango whizzed up with a bit of the juice from the can and a splosh of soya cream. YUM.


Lunch was awesomeness - Coronation Seitan (recipe at the end of this post).

I used to love me some Coronation chicken back in my omni days and I've tried it with seitan before and it's sucked royally - excuse the pun. But I think that it was just a clash of flavours, this one worked magically!

Not that I think anyone needs a tutorial on a sandwich but I was bored so I took some piccies!

First take a wrap of your choice and put some slices of cucumber in the middle:

Then spoon the seitan on topFold in the bottom of the wrap

Fold in the sidespull a daft face and then scoff!

Coronation Seitan
Ingredients:
1/2 cup / 125ml soya yoghurt
2 tbsp mayola (or vegan mayo of your choice)
1/4 - 1/2 tsp salt (depending on how salty you like)
1 tsp curry paste*
2 tbsp mango chutney
About a cup of chicken style seitan cut into smallish chunks

Method:
Mix together yoghurt, mayo, curry paste and salt until smooth. Then add the mango chutney and check for seasoning. Mix in the seitan and serve.

This will make 2 or 3 sandwiches and makes awesome filling for baked potatoes (that's tomorrow's lunch :) !!)

*I used 2 tsps cuz I like it spicy and extra curry-ish!

Onto dinner..... veggie paella, which rocked socks.

This was super easy. Just gently fry half an onion, sliced into thin half moons in a bit of olive oil. Add 1/2 a green and half a red pepper and some sliced mushrooms and cook for a couple of minutes.

Add 1/2 cup of aborio rice, 1.5 cups of veggie stock, 1 tsp of saffron powder (or turmeric if you don't like the flavour), 1 clove of garlic finely chopped, the leaves of 2 sprigs of thyme (I throw in the sticks too and just take them out when it's cooked), a good pinch of sea salt, a pinch of black pepper and 1/2 tsp of smoked paprika. Mix well, bring to the boil and turn down. Cover and cook on low for 10-15 mins until rice is tender. Add 1/2 a cup of frozen peas and cook until peas are done. Check seasoning and serve.

Baked goods tomorrow! :)

Vegan MoFo - Bitch! Jerk!

So I have this big bowl of chicken style seitan that I made sitting in my fridge and I have been eyeing the jerk seitan recipe in VwaV for ages.

However, I'm so fucking lazy that I bought a jar of jerk seasoning and cooked my seitan, some mushrooms and red pepper up in that instead. VwaW recommends serving it with coconut rice but as mentioned before we have a problem - I'm lazy. So instead of reading the recipe I made it up as I went along and I'm happy to say, it was freaking superrad!

To make the coconut rice, I took the 150ml (just over 1/2 a cup) of light coconut milk I had left from a disasterous effort of jelly and made it up to 1.5 cups with hot water. I mixed in 1/2 cup of jasmine rice and a tsp of creamed coconut and put it in my steamer for 20 minutes, et voila!

I added a bit of salt once it was on the plate but it really didn't need it and was much better without. I served it with some steamed broccoli and green beans.

It's not very photogenic though is it - looks a bit like dog food! Ah well, it tasted good which is what counts.

Cooking to: Snow Patrol - Songs for Polar Bears

Vegan MoFo - Mock-a-doodle-stew

Lame title. I'm sorry.

Today I had PMT - the angry kind and work sucked so I was fighting the urge to put on Rage Against the Machine and sing FUCK YOU I WON'T DO AS YOU TELL ME! at the top of my voice. I went with plan B instead - chick flick and comfort food. Plus angry PMT has turned to lameass teary PMT - I cried twice while watching the Sex & the City Movie!

I love a good stew and when I saw the Barefoot Contessa's show yesterday I knew I totally had to steal her idea! (This recipe.)

Ingredients (approximates as I didn't measure anything):
2 tbsp olive oil
1 medium onion
3 tbsp margarine
3 tbsp flour
2 cups ish stock (I used the faux chicken stock I cooked the seitan in)
1 clove of garlic
1 cup of chicken seitan (I made my own and more on that at some point during Vegan MoFo!)
small handful finely chopped parsley (about a tbsp)
leaves from 2 sprigs of time
1/2 cup peas (actually it was prob nearer to a cup - my hand slipped!)
2 carrots

Method:
Peel & chop the carrots and cook them in boiling water for 10 minutes.

Saute the onion in the olive oil for 5 minutes, then add the margarine and turn heat down low. In a separate pan, gently warm (don't boil) the stock. Once margarine is melted, add the flour and stir well, cook out flour taste for a minute or so. Slowly add the stock, bit by bit until you have a lovely thick smooth sauce.

Add the garlic and thyme, stir and cook for a minute or so then add the seitan, veggies and herbs, stir well, turn down low and cook with a lid on for 5-10 minutes. Serve with sprinkle of fresh parsley, dumplings and mashed potato! YUM.

I baked the dumplings / biscuits and just put then on the stew for the last 5 minutes. But I made a booboo! I just used the recipe on the side of the Atora packet but I use plain flour instead of self-raising and forgot to add baking powder. DOH. So they were more like hockey pucks than fluffy dumplings but hey, it's been that kind of day.

Cooking to: the Sex and the City Movie!

Vegan MoFo - Day 1!

It's October, which means Vegan MoFo has begun! I can't say I kicked it off with a huge bang but definitely a big one! I had another recipe in mind for today but my pissing casserole dish didn't arrive yet so I had to change my plans and went for Miso Tofu with a spicy, peanutty stir fry and soba noodles.

This was sooooooo tasty and the smell of it cooking was creasing me it smelt so good.


I bought a julienne peeler today and was dying to use it. And I have had this jar of miso in the fridge for ages and needed some inspiration on what to do with it. So I googled Miso Tofu recipe and found this one. I forgot to print it off and was too lazy to boot up the laptop so I decided to use it as inspiration and made it up as I went along.

So my marinade consisted of 1 big spoonful of brown miso, a couple of tbsp of soy, the same of rice vinegar, a tbsp or so of maple syrup, a splash of liquid smoke (a couple of tsps), a good grating of fresh ginger, a grated clove of garlic and a 1/4 tsp of chilli paste. Then I brushed it on and left it for 5 minutes then baked for 10 mins at 180C, flipped it and baked for another 10 minutes.

This is how awesome my julienner is ....

Somehow I managed to make just enough marinade for 1 block of tofu...

Cooking to: random 80s shite.

I'm looking forward to the challenge of posting enough for the rest of the month but it's going to be tough as I'm onsite for almost 2 weeks out of the month.

Oh and there will be baked goods before the week is out!!

I'm back. And I'm cold!

I'm back from beautiful cyprus and am wishing that I was still lounging on a lilo in the pool with a mojito, instead of thinking about going back to work and no doubt a fistful of shit landing on my desk as it always does when I've been away.

But anyway, I managed to take some food pics while I was away (and got really REEEEALLY bored of replying "IT'S FOR MY FOOD BLOG!!" everytime someone asked/ why I was taking pictures).

Pasta primavera - no cheese.

Dolmades - rice and veggies wrapped in vine leaves - SOOOO Yum!Inside shot of the dolmades

Vegetarian platter 1 - loads of grilled veggies, plus the usual side order of chips AND rice.

Vegetarian platter 2 - veggies stuffed with rice and the bestest roast potatoes in the world EVER!

Amazing local bread with cumin seeds on top and fresh hummus

Mojito! Sal & Em style

Sweeties, ignoree the pink and white ones though - they had dirty gelatine in so I didn't eat those!

Some rice salad my mum made to go with the barbecue we had, with some garlic bread and spring rolls also visible.

And lastly - the stuff I couldn't leave behind: gorgeous pittas, pasta, limes, veggie stock cubes and tinned tomatoes and a tin of hummus! Never seen tinned hummus - will get back to you on whether or not it's rank!

Lastly - a quick shameless plug to say please go vote for my cupcake!! There's only a couple of days left.

Iron Man, Iron Man, does whatever an iron can ....

So here it is, my first entry into the Iron Cupcake challenge. I’ve seen this on a few blogs and it looked like so much fun I had to take part! (Details of Iron Cupcake can be found here.)

This month’s ingredient was basil. I spent ages trying to come up with ingredients that would compliment basil and not make my cupcake taste like a salad gone wrong. What I came up with was lime & ginger.

The smell of these is gorgeous but also weird because cake just shouldn’t smell of basil!! But they are surprisingly delicious and I would make them again!

I had grand ideas of a topping made from almonds but it just didn’t work the way I wanted it to, so I went with a buttercream flavoured with fresh lime, fresh grated ginger and a basil leaf dipped in chocolate and a big glob of green food colouring for good measure. I’m really happy with the way they came out!

Here is my submission:



Sal’s Basil, Lime & Ginger Cupcakes
Dry Ingredients:
2 cups plain flour
1 cup caster sugar
Zest of 2 limes
1 tsp baking powder
½ tsp baking soda
¼ cup crystallised ginger, chopped
½ tsp salt
¼ tsp dried ground ginger
Wet Ingredients:
Juice of 2 limes
¾ cup non dairy milk
⅓ cup sunflower (or other light) oil
2 tbsp ginger jam
½ cup basil (not packed just lightly placed)
1 tsp vanilla extract
Frosting:
¼ cup vegan margarine
¼ cup vegetable shortening
3 – 3½ cups icing sugar (depending on the desired consistency
Fresh lime juice (up to 1 whole lime)
2 tsp fresh grated ginger
Green food colouring (optional)
Optional Decorations:
Slivers of lime zest
Basil leaves dipped in melted, dark chocolate

Method:
Preheat oven to 180C/350F.

Mix together all the wet ingredients, including the basil and blend with a hand blender until smooth as you can get it.

Mix together the dry ingredients, then pour the wet ingredients in and mix until just combined, don't overmix.

Pour into muffin tins and bake for around 25-30 minutes, until a cocktail stick comes out clean. Cool in the tins for at least 5 minutes, then turn out onto a wire rack until completely cold.

To make the frosting, cream together the margarine, shortening and icing sugar with a fork. Add the lime juice a tbsp at a time, until desired consistency is reached. Add the ginger and food colouring bit by bit and beat with an electric hand beater till the icing is fluffy and smooth. Pipe or spread onto the cupcakes and add a chocolate basil leaf if required.

Here’s a bonus pic as well.... I split the batter between a muffin tin and a sheet pan and cut a couple out with a square scone cutter, to make a couple of square cakes. I sandwiched these together with buttercream and then decorated the top with stars of buttercream and a chocolate basil leaf.

The winner of this month’s challenge gets prizes provided by Etsy Artist METAL SUGAR so be sure to head on over and have a look, and don’t forget to visit the sponsors of the challenge too:

HEAD CHEFS by FIESTA PRODUCTS
HELLO CUPCAKE by Karen Tack and Alan Richardson
JESSIE STEELE APRONS
CUPCAKE COURIER
TASTE OF HOME


Voting starts Sunday over at NO ONE PUTS CUPCAKE IN A CORNER - so go vote for me! Pretty please. And if you want to sign up for next month’s challenge go on over to http://ironcupcake.blogspot.com.

Cooking to: Chemical Brothers - Brotherhood

That’s probably it from me until I get back from holiday, so hopefully I’ll be posting pics of delicious foodz from Cyprus in just over a week.

xxx