AusNZVeganMoFo: It's getting hot in here...

... so take off all your clothes? How about we just cool down with some salad instead. One beautiful last autumn day towards the end of August I had planned to make some pierogies. However, the great weather gods looked down and decreed that in fact I should not be attempting to make dough on this day, and they made it a 35 degree Celcius day. And it was hot, and it was good. So then there was salad!

Yes, Brisbane had a taste of summer at the end of autumn, and it was glorious. I do love the heat. And even going into the evening, it was still hot. So instead of cooking anything, dinner plans were changed to a salad buffet. Here's what we had:



This is Creamy Asian Pear and Tempeh Salad with Wasabi Dressing from Veganomicon. Asian pears, as I discovered in a previous post, are actually Nashi fruit (which I love to munch on). This salad is fabulous. So creamy and the nashi and peas just add the right amount of something to it. But this salad is now famous because my brother ate it and did not make the 'Eww! I hate tempeh!' face of doom. He liked the tempeh in this! Probably because of all the other flavours around it. Isa suggests serving with rice crackers or cakes. I served with some rice crackers and it is delicious both on its own or piled on top of a cracker.


Quinoa Salad with Black Beans and Mangoes from Veganomicon is one of my favourite salads ever. It is just a perfect summery dish to my mind, and I knew I just had to make it again. Sadly, while the day was summery the season was not so I had to make do with some tinned mangoes (don't judge me!) but it was still so wonderful. If you have not made this before, all I can say is DO IT! I also use 1 cup of chopped mint instead of the cilantro. The first time I made it was back when I hated cilantro. Now I enjoy it, but to me the mint flavour just goes so much better with this and is so refreshing. Try it both ways.


I also made Indonesia-Style Vegetable Salad from Vegan Planet. This was very exciting, as it was my first time ever using jicama, sold over here in Asian grocery stores as yam bean. I was a bit worried at first that I might have got the wrong thing, until I ate a bit and it was exactly as described! Kind of potato-apple thing. Delicious! Here it is shredded along with cabbage and carrots. The sauce is a cooked peanut sauce, which was nice but I would add more peanut butter next time because I love my peanut sauce to be super peanutty. It saus to use 1 cup of coconut milk or as needed, enough to make sauce of the right consistency. I didn't use the whole cup but it may depend on how saucy you like it! I also tossed through 200g of dried rice noodles that I had cooked and cooled. Combined with bean sprouts, raisins and peanuts it was lovely.


This is a salad my mother made. Cucumber, tomato, butter beans, lots of fresh parsley and a balsamic dressing. Yum!


And, of course, a big bowl of greens. You can never have too many greens. Ever.


We ate out on the deck, in the balmy evening air, with a big line of salads down the table for us to pick at. Nom.


And here is my plate, with a bit of everything piled on. It was a great dinner, exactly what was needed for such a night. The weather has cooled down a bit now, but summer is still on its way, so no doubt lots more salads to come! Yum!

You will notice that I have joined in AusNZVeganMoFo, a group of Australian and NZ bloggers trying to post as often as they can for the month of September. I am very excited to be taking part, if a few days late to the party. It is inspiring me to get back into regular blogging, so watch this space!

Other blogs taking part include:

Cupcake Kitteh
Iron Chef Vegan
Unwakeable
The Tropical Vegan
Kblog
BrisVegan
For Esme
Annabananabomb
Twilight and Shadow
Ink and Venom
Vegan, Sixteen

So go and visit them as well!

Cute Cat Photo of the Post:

Today's cutie is Pascall. Pascall was my fourth cat. We got her from the RSPCA at the end of 1993 and she was a gorgeous silver tabby with a delightful nature. Sadly, when she was under a year old Pascall was diagnosed with Feline Leukaemia Virus and a tumour (lymphosarcoma) on her kidney. She was put to sleep on the first day of spring in 1994, less than a year old. I will always remember how she used to sleep in bed with me with her head on the pillow and body under the blankets, just like me. She was a beautiful cat.

Menu: Early Autumn Supper from The Complete Vegan Cookbook

Another day, another menu, as I do. To celebrate the start of Autumn I decided to make this Early Autumn Supper menu from The Complete Vegan Cookbook (my second ever vegan cookbook and the first one I started using regularly).

Here's what it has to offer.



Grilled Butternut Squash Soup with Shiitake Mushrooms. Sadness, I'm afraid. The recipe called for such a teeny amount of pumpkin, by the time you add the stock and the soy milk it is very pale and the flavour is so very faint. I didn't have the facilities to grill the pumpkin, so I roasted it. Maybe that had some great influence on the intensity of flavour? It also had cute little soup pasta in it, which added some bulk. Alas, the mushrooms ended up being flavourless and squidgy. *sigh* I served it with fresh wholemeal bread rolls, which were tasty!



Green Bean Salad with Asian Seasonings is much more tasty. I've made this before and it is very tasty. The only problem is that it only makes quite a small amount. Unfortunately, but the time the soup and rolls and salad were done, people were asking if there was a main course. Alas, the answer is no. But there was...



Dried Apricot and Coconut Pudding! The undoubted winner of this menu. It is SO yummy and creamy and sweet. A blog of soy ice cream would go really nice with it.

So, we had a wishy washy pumpkin soup, a lovely but too small salad and an amazing dessert. Not the biggest success, but the dessert is certainly worth repeating and the salad is a great little side.

Menu: Summer Harvets Feast from The Vegan Gourmet

Yes, I have been a little menu fiend again. Monday night was family night and I had the day off. I started out the day with a bit of factory outlet shopping in the morning, during which I managed to buy almost nothing of use for my trip to England save a pair of awesome jeans that may not stretch out quite enough (oh, the trauma of buying jeans), and yet I did manage to come home with a set of pastel sundae dishes... well, you know... priorities. The, home to the kitchen! I decided to make the 'Summer Harvest Feast' menu from 'The Vegan Gourmet'



This is Crostini With Greek Eggplant Topping, not assembled at this stage so as not to get soggy. The bread that I used is the delicious Pumpkin and Pepita bread from Sol Breads, which has to be one of my favourite breads. It went really well and added a nice bit of chewy bulk to the meal as opposed to cardboardy white stuff. The Greek Eggplant Topping is quite nice, though being a Baba Ganoush lover I did note the lack of tahini and found it a bit washed out in comparison. But that is just me. Left overs keep well, and are great as a dip or on rice crackers. In fact, I just finished off the last of it while typing this on a nice rice and corn cake. Mmmmm.



Soft Polenta With Corn Kernels and Sage was a bit of a let down. The polenta is cooked with water and was sadly a bit watery even though the texture was right. It just needed a bit more taste to it. Next time I would add some veggie stock to the cooking liquid. The sweet corn kernels and onion were nice additions. I have some of this left over in the freezer. Eventually I plan on slicing it, grilling it and topping it with some sort of fabulous and super tasty sauce.



This was my favourite part of the menu. It is Green Beans with Watercress and Orange-Mint Dressing. It's such a refreshing salad, and the dressing is seriously addictive. it makes a fairly small amount all up, but I had a little bit left over for lunch the next day. I have to admit I love the dressing so much that when I finished the salad for lunch, I drank the rest of the dressing left in the container. Oh. The same. Hee.



And here it is, all plated up and begging to be in your belly.

Silly Sausage!

Sometimes, meals start with a side dish. I have been flicking through Vegan Planet a lot lately - I do love that book - and seeing as it is now summer I am looking at some salady type stuff to be making. I love a pasta salad, so I decided I should make Lighten Up Pasta Salad on Thursday evening. But what to go with? Pasta salad does not equal dinner. Well, sometimes it does, but not this night. The book suggested it is a great side for vegan sausages, and I remembered reading a homemade vegan sausage recipe not too long ago. I was sold!

The recipe in question comes was Homemade Sausages from Vegan Dad, which in turn seem to come from Isa's blog at The PPK. I made a double batch, because that was how much my tin of beans would make and also because I have a work BBQ on Sunday and wanted some extra sausages to take along to that.

The recipe is easy enough to follow and make. While other spice combinations are suggested, I followed the recipe to the letter for this first attempt. For those of you used to making seitan-type proucts before, this mixture is a lot more moist compared to if you are making seitan chunks or cutlets. I have to say, when you are forming the logs on the alfoil sheets, it is not the most appetising thing to look at! But don't let that put you off!

This recipe called for the sausages to be steamed. VeganDad and some other blogs I've seen have bought handy steamer trays that fit right into their saucepans. I didn't have the exact perfect steamer to use here, but I cobbled one together. I only have one of those vegetable steamers that expands to the size of your saucepan. For this recipe you work you need a large flat steamer to fit the sausages. What I did was I used this steamer in my 10L stockpot. The stockpot was big enough so that the steamer basket was completely extended and flat. That alone didn't really leave enough room to add much water underneath for the steaming, so I propped it up using a small round metal cake rack. That gave me room to add a good inch or so of water underneath. I then steamed it on medium heat with the lid on.



Here is a picture of the sausages placed in my makeshift sausage steamer. What dazzling silverness! It actually worked great, and could be used for any steamed sietan recipe. The only thing is that my steamer has a permanently attached spike in the middle with a ring to allow you to remove it from your saucepan, so that would make this unable to be used for large seitan roasts. However you can get these vegetable steamers with detachable hooks. I used to have one in Sydney, but I don't know where it is after the move, so I will go and buy another one. Much cheaper than buying the actual steamer component to the stockpot. Hurrah!



Here are the sausages, all steamed and awaiting their next fate. I had to steam them in two batches because I had doubled the recipe and only 6 at a time would fit in the steamer. One thing I wasn't sure is if I was meant to unwrap them from the foil to let them cool, or if I was supposed to let them cool in the foil. So for each batch I did a different thing. No really huge difference, but I think that the ones that cooled still wrapped in foil held up a bit better.



And here's dinner! I fried the sausages in a fry pan with just a smidge of olive oil. I also fried up some sliced onions to go with them. So homemade sausages and onions in a roll with ketchup and mustard. Also pictured here are the Lighten Up Pasta Salad and the Sweet Baby Salad from Coles. I know, prepackaged salads = evil. Bit I really like this one because it has lots of fun and interesting green stuff in it. Also I baked some frozen French Fries. Which weren't strictly needed but I saw them in the photo with the sausages from Vegan Dad and thus my craving was born!

The verdict? The sausages are amazingly wonderful! So tasty, amazing texture, completely cruelty free and you get to feel incredibly smug for having made your own sausages from scratch. Tee hee. They were maybe a little heavy on the fennel, so I might tone that down a bit next time. The Lighten Up Pasta Salad from Vegan Planet was quite a nice side dish, but did just seem to be lacking a little something in flavour. I like the Deli Macaroni Salad from Veganomicon better. But all around a great dinner!

And tomorrow I am taking both left over sausages and salad to my work Christmas BBQ, to show them all how much it rocks to be vegan!

Oh yeah, do yourself a favour and go and make the sausages if you haven't already!