'Taste Of India' Menu

This Monday night was our first family night in a while. Holidays and work and life had gotten in the way the last few weeks. And with the parentals heading off cruising on Saturday for a couple of weeks it will be the last full family night for a while. This particular night was made extra special by the addition of my brother's love girlfriend.

So I decided to flick through all those lovely menu suggestions, and I picked out the 'Taste Of India' menu from Vegan Planet.



Here is the first course, which was actually just served with all the other food. It is 'Curried Cauliflower Pakoras', but I also used some sliced zucchini slices. Pretty tasty, though in my heart or hearts I am not much one for deep fried things and can only tolerate small amounts before being sick. They were quite nice as a bit of a treat though. I served them with this great tamarind chutney my mum gets from the deli. The pakoras can be fried a bit before hand and kept warm in the oven, but you wouldn't want to leave them too long or they will likely get soggy.



'Spicy Jasmine Rice With Carrots And Cashews' was the side dish, though if you are a lover of spice you can definitely add some extra, I have no lasting memory of spiny taste at all! You need cooked, cold rice for this recipe, so really when the time comes to making it, it is ready in a snap.



And the main event, as it was. 'Three Bean Dal', made with black beans (down to 12.5 cups in the freezer now I believe), kidney beans and yellow split peas. It is thick and filling and darn tasty! There were also two other main course recipes suggested - Tofu Vindaloo and Sweet Potato and Red Bean Curry. However as there were only the four of us and there is only so much room on the stove and so much room in our bellies I just picked one. I have made the Tofu Vindaloo before and it is great. The other curry shall have to wait for a different night.



And here it is, all together now! It makes for a very satisfying dinner indeed. The only thing it was maybe missing was something green... battered and fried zucchini aside... but that is probably just my addiction to green vegetables coming out. I have withdrawls if I don't get me some greens.



And, of course... let's not forget dessert! Tee hee! It is Coconut-Cardamom Rice Pudding, with pistachios and rose water. The rose water really didn't come through, even in smell, so next time I might add a bit more. Because it is summer here I served these chilled. It is creamy and sweet and delicious.

Overall a pretty great menu. It's a bit fiddly when it comes to the final count down of preparations. I love my mother, who was kitchen wench extraordinaire on the night, washing and drying up as quickly as I handed her new dirty dishes... what a champion! Then my brother volunteered to wash up as well. It was a great family night. The next few will be myself and my brother all on our own, but I am looking forward to making a few fun menus for the two of us.

On another note, I hope everyone had a fabulous New Year. Hopefully a fantastic 2009 awaits us all!

Baking for Christmas.

Yesterday I woke up, felt in a bit of a funk, and then pulled myself out of it with a mammoth baking extravaganza. It. Was. Awesome! So much fun, and so very zen. Here are the goodies...



In all its cooling on the table glory. Tee hee! Let's see what they made?



Here are some truffles. Sorry about the horrific photo, I had about three seconds to take it. Anyway, the ones with coconut on the outside are Rum Truffles (with raisins) from The Vegan Cookbook (my very first vegan cookbook ever so many years ago). The ones that are just covered in cocoa are a variation I made up - Cointreau Truffles (with chopped dates). They are both very yummy. And very high in alcohol!



Isa's Gingerbread Men, though they are sadly nekkid and undecorated. I was going to make some royal icing to make them pretty today, but my intentions were thwarted. Boo hiss. While they may be nekkid, they are still yummy though.



From the second I saw them, I had to have them! They are Strawberry Santa Hats from Wing It Vegan. They are so adorable! I made the coconut cake from the recipe on the blog, and it is so very easy and tasty. I used the Buttercream recipe from The Joy Of Vegan Baking. And they taste great - I love the freshness of the strawberry with the coconut and the buttercream. But... if you think that they are cute...



REINDEER CUPCAKES! Oh, they are so adorable. Again, I got the inspiration from Wing It Vegan. So cute I could *die*. I used the basic chocolate cupcake recipe from Vegan Cupcakes Take Over The World and I iced them with Chocolate Ganache (also from VCTOTW) rather than buttercream. The nose is a halved fresh cherry and the eyes are spots of buttercream with chocolate chips as pupils. The antlers are pretzels. They have no mouths, because everything I tried just looked kind of strange. So they are silent.



And here is a (slightly blurry) close up, just to revel in the CUTE! Tee hee.

This morning I woke up full of plans for more baking, including dressing my gingerbread men. Alas, I woke up with the headache that Nurofen would not budge. Which seems to be evolving into the slight feeling of ookiness that may come before a flu. Hmmm... not for Christmas!

Oh well, the stollen, mince pies and shortbread will have to wait until next year. Or, more likely, until June when I make winter solstice Yule festivities.

'Summery Middle Eastern Supper'

I love menus. In fact, I am something of a menu tart. I love putting them together, and I love following other people's suggestions. So for me the 'menu suggestions' in my cookbooks are always super exciting - I can't help myself.

I made this menu, the 'Summery Middle Eastern Supper', on Friday night. It is from 'The Vegan Gourmet', a great little cookbook. Some seriously yummy and easy stuff in here! As it is indeed quite summery here at the moment, it seemed like a good choice of menu. The menu was made up of three recipes...



Curried Eggplant And Garbanzo Patties, seen here posing on a sandwich with mixed lettuce and chutney - AKA my lunch for the following day. These are pretty easy to make, but are a bit fragile. I added extra breadcrumbs to them to help them stay together more, but they definitely need to be treated with care. They are baked, rather than fried, so that at least stops them falling apart in the pan when you are trying to flip them! Fragility aside, these are tasty little morsels. I only made half the patties on this night, the rest of the mixture is currently frozen awaiting future use.



Bulgur With Tomatoes, Mint and Toasted Pine Nuts was a great salad and extremely quick and easy to make. It has wonderful flavours, and was made with mint picked from my own herb - hurrah! The pine nuts really add all sorts of nummy tastes to it. I kept the left overs for various lunches and it keeps extremely well.



Cauliflower Sauteed With Peaches And Cardamom. Interesting. I really did like it, but I think with the sweetness involved you would have to be in the mood for it. It was really fast to make, and can be served at room temperature as well if you want to make it ahead of time. I think it is better warmed though.



And here it is, all done up and ready to jump into my belly. There's also some raw cucumber spears on the plate, and I served it with iced peppermint tea (so good on a hot day). It was a pretty nommish dinner, and all came together very nicely. It's a great dinner to put together ahead of time. Both the salad and the saute can be served at room temperature, and the patties can be mixed and shaped ahead of time. So all that is left to do is pop the patties in the oven when the time comes, and then practically instant dinner. Well, not really instant because you spent the time beforehand putting the rest of it together. But that was then, and this is now. So instant.

And now I must be off to bed. I spent all day baking Christmas themed goodies, with more to go tomorrow. So expect a sugar-laden post tomorrow night. I have to say, I am seriously chuffed with some of the stuff I have made. Tee hee!

Thai Style Tofu With Butternut Pumpkin

Dinner tonight came thanks to Tofu 1-2-3, a great little book that I picked up a while ago. Every recipe contains some form of tofu, and the recipes range from snacks to desserts to breakfasts to soups to mains.

The 'Thai Style' I can only assume comes from the coconut milk involved. A mix of curry and chili powder plus ginger, garlic and some other spice that evades my memory make up the main flavour of the dish. It is also nice and chunky with tofu, butternut pumpkin and broccoli! The recipe also called for red capsicum, but as I rarely if ever actually enjoy this vegetable I left it out. I served it over brown basmati rice.

It was pretty easy to make. There was some chopping involved in the prep work, but once everything is all lined up and ready to go there is very little effort. All up the cooking time is about 40-50 minutes, but a lot of this is simmering while covered time and it only needs occasional stirring.

The verdict was pretty tasty. My parents both enjoyed it.

And for an added bonus, here is another dinner I recently made from the same book. Captain Tofu!



Apparently it is based on some East Indian Chicken Curry thing, according to the little blurb in the book. The tofu is coated and fried first, and then mixed in to a yummy tomato sauce and baked. I left out the green capsicum (foul under any circumstances) and put in some zucchini instead.

An afternoon of baking.

I've been in a bit of a baking funk of late. But today I got back into the kitchen and cranked up the trusty double oven. The music was Kylie Minogue, her latest two albums - X and Body Language. Loud and repeated. I am going to the Kylie concert in Sydney on Sunday night, so I am training myself back up in all the Kylie ways. But on to the baking!



Hello Blondie! Macadamia Blondies With Caramel Maple Topping from Vegan With A Vengeance, to be precise. Given that this recipe used three and a half bags of macadamia nuts, and macadamias are somewhat on the pricey side of things, I have been slowly amassing a super secret macadamia stash over the past couple of months. When you spread out the cost it is not that scary. And given that I have had them all for the last couple of weeks now, it is practically like using them for free. If you follow my logic there.

The caramel maple topping didn't quite go thick and caramely as the book suggested it should Instead it sort of soaked into the blondie base and left a nice sweet glaze over the nuts on top.

It was really, really yummy. They are gooey and rich and sweet and awesome.



And here are some Banana Wheat Germ Muffins from Veganomicon. I had wanted to make these a few days go, however there seemed to be a wheat germ shortage in south east Queensland that foiled my plans. Until today! Which is good, because my bananas were so black and soft that they didn't have much time left.

They are sweet and tasty and make me feel very healthy.

So nice to be back into the baking. I am sure the kids at work will be grateful when I take them to work tomorrow to share!

A Tale Of Two BBQs.

Alas my friends, this is an almost photo free post because the battery on my camera died. Woe! Doom! Despair! Agony!

So today I attended not one but *two* BBQs - breakfast and lunch. That would bring my grand total of BBQs attended this year to... ummm.... two! Anyway, I turned up and showed how much vegans totally rock.

The first BBQ was the annual extended family breakfast BBQ. It was held at my cousin's house out at Chappel Hill, and her balconies overlook beautiful views of bushland. It was a good morning, with lots of aunts, uncles and cousins. Though there seem to be a disturbingly large number of children now popping up at these family events. I'm sticking with the cats, thanks! Thankfully the kids kept themselves occupied with TV and the swing set. I don't really do children.

For my vegan breakfast, I enjoyed rolls with tempeh bacon (using again the marinade from Vegan Vittles) and fresh tomato, stone fruit salad with vanilla soy yoghurt and Applesauce And Oat Bran Muffins from Veganomicon.



And here is the one photo for the post. It is one of the muffins, with Nuttelex and raspberry jam. After this, my battery decided it was all too much, so you'll have to imagine.

Let me say, I was stuffed full after this breakfast! It was great. There was a lot of interest in the tempeh bacon, and a couple of people even ventured to try it and really liked it! Alas, my brother was not one of those people. It turns out he cannot stand the texture of tempeh. Give me time and I'll change that - hee.

Me and my full belly then waddled home to pick up the food for the next BBQ, which was my work's Christmas party. It was held at a bowls club, so some barefoot bowls insanity was enjoyed. I took along some of the vegan sausages of awesome and the Lighten Up Macaroni Salad from Vegan Planet that I made on Thursday. I fried up my sausages on alfoil on the BBQ before the meat fest began. There was a lot of interest in the sausages. Next time I shall tape the ingredients on my forehead because I repeated them so often!

I also took Rum Truffles from The Vegan Cookbook. These are amazing. And are not stingy on the rum. Especially because I always add a few extra splashes to make the flavour better. And all that rum is in no way cooked out of it. They were quite popular! Tee hee. I'll be making these again closer to Christmas, so I promise I shall have photos of them then.

Now I am at home. My belly was very full. I enjoyed a cup of peppermint tea from the beautiful T2 teabags my secret santa got me (I drink a lot of peppermint tea at home and at work), then I had some salad and some fries. And the left over rum truffles. And now I am going to bed!

A great day of BBQs. Looking at the meatfest that the omnis were eating, all I can say is that I am really glad to be vegan. We rock!

Vegan in an Omni World: Michael's Oriental

Saturday was Mum's 60th birthday, so to celebrate Dad took us and all her brothers and sisters out to dinner at Michael's Oriental in Eight Mile Plains. Chinese restaurants can either be fantastic for vegans, or a nightmare. Chicken stock and oyster sauce seem to sneak their way in to the most innocent of looking dishes in some places. So I rang in advance to make sure I would be able to eat there. I have to say the staff were very helpful. They already knew what a vegan actually was, which is always a bonus! When we got to the restaurant, I spoke to the woman behind the desk and she made sure the wait staff and the chefs knew all about how my food was to be prepared. The fact that she could list to me all the things they didn't use if there was a vegan dining there was very reassuring.

The parentals and the aunts and uncles all partook of the 'Ultimate Feast', which quite frankly was just a parade of different sorts of dead critters, so I will not even bother to recap any of it here. Even their vegetables had some crab sauce thing on it. For myself and my brother, who is a fledgling vegetarian, we had out own little veggie feast.



For out entree we shared the vegetarian spring rolls. They were OK, as far as vegetarian spring rolls go, though certainly not the best ever. That honour for me still belongs to Jasmine Rice in Wollongong. Although I have had a few close seconds recently. But there weren't those. They were perfectly pleasant, but a little bit gluggy.

For our mains, we shared two dishes. Which was fun because normally I just end up having one dish to myself. So it is nice to have someone to share with for a bit more variety!



This is stir fried vegetables in a chilli plum sauce. The vegetables were cooked so that they were still a bit crunchy, which I love. The sauce was nice, but there was no chilli in it that I could really taste. I guess we should have asked for them to make it a bit hotter!



And this is Fried Tofu, Bok Choy and Mushrooms, which is in a thick soy sauce. This was great. The fried tofu was particularly excellent! And this was all served with rice in the cutest little bamboo buckets. I wish I had a photo of them!

So overall, not a bad vegan dining experience. Pretty darn expensive for some vegetables though, so I really doubt I'd be going there again on a regular basis with so many other yummy cheap options around the area. But nice for special occasions for the meat eaters, and good to know that the vegans and vegetarians are looked after so well.

In other news, there was a wedding reception there as well and they played 'The Glory Of Love' not once, but twice. Frakking awesome! It's my favourite cheesy love song!

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!

Cooking with LJ Part 1- Tragedy to Triumph

I have a lovely friend. Her name is LJ, or Lil' Jen. Not to be confused with Jen, or Big Jen. BJ is currently across the seas at the moment living the life in London. So LJ and I must fill the time of her absence by amusing ourselves so we don't sit around missing her. Which we do!

On Monday LJ and I got together to make cupcakes. LJ claims she does not cook. It is effort to cook. Plus her fiance cooks and there are a zillion great places to eat out, so really there is no need. But she confessed a desire to bake for her fiance. And so that is what we did! Interesting results... Come with us, gentle reader, on the story of our Monday....



This is LJ with her special pan she bought. It is a red silicon heart-shaped pan. Very cute! The recipe we chose was Peanut Butter Cupcakes from Vegan Cupcakes Take Over The World. I had hoped they would be firm enough to hold up to not having cupcake liners, as we couldn't find anything heart shaped in that department. Hmmmm...



Carefully reading and preparing the ingredients.



And beating together the liquid ingredients. Mwahahahaha! Take that liquid ingredients.



And, finally, placing the batter into the treasured red heart pan. What happened next.... was... ummm... well, a bit sad really!



Sad Peanut Butter Cupcakes! Not only were they not strong enough to hold themselves together without the liner, but for some reason the silicon pans refused to let go of them. The ones pictured here are from a regular round silicon pan. Sad, smooshed cupcakes. *sniffles*

So, the moral of the story is don't try cupcakes without a liner. If you want something heart shaped, try muffins instead!

But, what to do with this mess? LJ was taking hers home to try nestling them in ice cream so you couldn't see the malformed bottoms. As for mine, I knew I wanted to do something with chocolate. So I made the Chocolate Fudge Sauce from The Joy Of Vegan Baking. I took the smooshed cupcakes and smooshed them into my cute cupcake ramekins. I didn't have any soy icecream in the house (sad) so I topped each with a Sweet And Sara Vegan Marshmallow. Then I poured warm fudgey sauce all over it and sprinkled with chopped peanuts. Behold:



Oh. So. Good. So rich and sugary sweet, so only something to be eaten in moderation. But... wowzer! So, from tragedy to triumph! Hurrah!

Family Night Funsies

I live at home with my brother and my parents - I know, how very Gen Y of us - and Monday night is family night in our house. We all get together and eat and talk and do whatever.

Tonight I made Eggplant And Chickpea Kibbeh from Vegan Planet. It's a layer of sauteed eggplant and pine nuts sanwiched between a spiced bulgur and chickpea mix. It was really rather good!



I served it as suggested, with hommus thinned with a bit of soymilk to make it a bit saucier. I made the hommus from a recipe in The Complete Vegan Cookbook (the hommus component of the sandwiches with hommus and tomato culcumber salsa - I made the entire thing last year and it is amazing!) and thinned it out. It was still quite thick though, I didn't want to make it too runny or dilute that marvellous taste too much. I also served it with some steamed broccoli, because you can never have too many greens.

After dinner we put up our Christmas tree. Yes, that is right happy people! It is now December, so I can now officially acknowledge that Christmas is coming upon us. Hurrah! It was a lot of fun. Afterwards, Gizmo became entranced with the tree and started rubbing her little nose all over the lower branches. Then she started trying to jump up the trunk! Naughty kitty cat. Cute kitty cat. As it is we don't put any ornaments dangling from the bottom brances. It is just too tempting for a certain little red cat named Sahara.

In any event, here is our angel:



She's a bit lopsided, but she always is. When she's not swan diving off the top of the tree that is. Something she does with surprising frequency!

After dinner we had the most ridiculous dessert. It was one of those things that you cobble together to make something decent out of a cookery malfunction. However, I am going to leave that to the next post, as there is quite a fun story behind it!

Chocolate Chip Cookie Fest!

Ah yes, more chocolate chip cookies. They really are that ultimate go to cookie of awesome, are they not? Anyway, hot on the heels of last weeks Isa's Chocolate Chip Cookies, I decided to try another recipe I'd been reading about on blogs. I was reading what the lovely Becks had to say over at I am not a rabbit, and her delicious experiences with Dreena Burton's Homemade Chocolate Chip Cookies. And seeing as I had an entire eight hours off from work during the day on Saturday (oh, luck me!) I thought a batch of chocolate chip cookies was just the ticket.



And here they are! Once again, the dough was not super thick. But as the recipe didn't mention anywhere that it shouldn't be, I didn't worry too much. I baked the cookies for 11 minutes as requested, and they were indeed a golden colour when I removed them. They were also very soft when I took them out. This tends to happen, then I tend to pop them back in for short amounts of time and hope I don't accidentally over do it leading to the crispy cookies syndrome. Not that crispy cookies aren't great in their own right, but sometimes you want chewy. This time I decided to go with the recipe, and so took them out. They remained very soft and melt in your mouth evenwhen cooled. And were definitely handle with care cookies. I prefer my chocolate chip cookies a bit crisp on the outside but chewy on the inside, so next time I will definitely bake for a few minutes more.

But yummy! The Sunday crew at work also really enjoyed them today as well.

Black Bean Bonanza!

I think I speak for most people when I say that I like to keep my pantry stocked with a range of tinned beans. Kidney beans, chickpeas, borlotti beans, cannelini beans, butter beans... so on and so forth. But there are some types of tinned beans I just can't get a hold of easily. Adzuki beans... navy beans... and black beans! When I lived in Sydney I could get quite a lot of choice at the GNC on Glebe Point Road, and I'm sure that Macro stocks a whole bunch. But since coming to Brisbane, I've been a bit stuck. I've been to Mrs Flannery's, but of late the selection has been very sad and one of their stores doesn't stock tinned beans at all in winter!

I was sick and tired of not having black beans, and so I bought a big bag of dried beans. A lot. And then I cooked them. Cooking beans from scratch is super fun and makes you feel very virtuous. The dried beans were beautiful, shiny and black. And when you first put the water on to soak them they look like pretty black river stones. So nice! By the next day they had expanded quite a lot! So I ended up cooking them in 2 batches so there would be enough room in the pot. Most of the books I have said that it would take 1.5-2 hours to cook, but mine cooked in under an hour, so the moral of the story is always check your beans regularly for being done.

I'm not sure how much I started with in dry weight, but I ended up with 14.5 cups of cooked black beans! Hurrah! I divided them up into snaplock bags in 1 cup, 1.5 cup and 2 cup quantities to put in the freezer, so now I can make black bean recipes whenever I wish - tee hee! Here they are all packaged up and ready to go in the freezer.



And here is my first black bean recipe!



Black Bean Burgers, from Veganomicon, which I had for lunch. Yummy! I had it on a turkish roll with baby spinach leaves, fresh roma tomatoes and ketchup, and it was absolutely wonderful. After years of dodgy vegan burger and ball recipes that just crumbled before they were even formed, it is wonderful to have recipes that form and stay formed.

Stay tuned for more adventures in black beans! 12.5 cups worth of adventures, in fact.

Everyone's doing it. Isa's cookies that is.

A while ago, Isa over at the Post Punk Kitchen posted her new chocolate chip cookie recipe of awesome. It became a world wide cookie making crazy. So, not one to shy away from peer pressure under the right circumstances, I gave them a crack. And YUM!

I found that my dough was not as firm as Isa's recipe implied it should be. It was actually quite runny still. I have this issue a lot. I am not sure why. Maybe because I use lite soy milk? Maybe because I used arrowroot instead of tapioca? Who knows! As such, it took me a bit longer than the 8 minutes to bake them, but only a bit longer. I might try and add a bit more flour next time to stiffen the dough up a bit.

They are delicious. Chewy on the outside and soft of the inside and scrumptious all over. And considering they take 15 minutes to make, one bowl to wash up and they bake in a snap, there really is no reason not to make them. Right. Now. Go on!

And on a completely random note, I am thinking that Van Helsing might be one of the worst movies *ever* made. So why not turn off the TV and make cookies instead? See how I totally tied that in to the main theme of the post? See?

Can't go past the pasta.

I haven't really been blogging too much about what I have been cooking of late. Bad Susan. But here I shall make it up with a feast of CARBS. I love pasta in all its forms. I love that it is generally super quick to make, that it generally includes lots of fresh vegetables and interesting tastes, plus all the fun you can have with different types of pastas. The pasta section of my pantry is practically bursting with fettucine (I love the spinach variety), spaghetti (wholemeal - yum), fusilli, macaroni (straight and elbow), penne, ziti, linguine, vemicelli... it goes on and there are still more out there to try. Just the other night I stumbled across this fantastic pasta glossary. The different types of pasta available are just insane!

Anyway, here are some of my favourite pasta dishes that I've been making over the past few weeks, and a couple of old favourites as well. I will mention that, as a general rule, I always use less pasta than the recipe states. 1 pound (or 450g, which lets face it is pretty much just going to be a 500g packet) is what most cookbooks use for a 4 person recipe, and this just makes way too much for me, even with my big appetite and love of carbs. I also prefer it this way because it means it is saucier, which is always a good thing! I probably use a half to three quarters of the pasta required by the recipe.



This is meant to be Orecchiette With Cherry Tomatoes And Kalamata Olives, however at the time I was unable to find orecchiette (curse you Roselands shopping center and your lack of exciting pasta shapes!), so I made it with, umm, macaroni. Oh well. The fact is that this is blow your mind tasty. It's practically a tapenade all mixed up with your pasta, and then the cherry tomatoes add this burst of freshness. So yum! Oh yeah, and it is from Vegan With A Veangeance.



It's kind of blurry, but it is Spinach Linguine With Basil Mint Pesto from Veganomicon. I haven't made that much homemade pesto yet, and this was one of my first. And OMG - do eeeet! It was amazing. I think this dish would also be great with some strips of chicken style seitan or Fry's Schnitzels or something along those lines.

The next three recipes are all ones I have made in the last few weeks, and they all come from Vegan Planet. I am on quite the VP kick at the moment. Though there are 400 recipes in it, so it has lots to offer.



This is Alfredo-Style Fettucine. The Alfredo sauce is based on onion, white wine (or a teeny splash of white wine vinegar in my case, or just leave it out all together), almonds, silken tofu, miso, soymilk, nutmeg and cayenne. It is a really nice, creamy sauce that is not too heavy and sits really nicely with the spinach fettucine I used. It was excellent with liberal sprinklings of nooch, and with a nice salty green, like sauteed broccolini as pictured here. The sauce takes a bit of preparation, but the whole thing still comes together pretty quickly.



I am always a bit skeptical of anything with tahini, because the truth is I am not really a tahini fan. Sure, I love it all whizzed up into hommus and things like that, but otherwise I am always a bit worried that the taste will be overpowering. Not in Tahini Rotini (or fusilli) with Broccoli and Lemon. The sauce is basically a hommus-style sauce - in addition to the tahini there is chickpeas, garlic and lemon, but it is thinned with vegetable stock. It is wonderful. I also increased the broccoli content of this recipe from the required 2 cups to however much my two large heads of broccoli yield.

On another note - other excellent tahini recipes include the tomato tahini pasta sauce from Easy Vegan Cooking and Isa's tahini sauce recipe from one or possibly both of her cookbooks.



This final dish of the Vegan Planet Pasta Trilogy is Ziti, Artichokes and Kalamatas with Spicy Tomato Sauce. This is a really, really tasty little pasta dish. And it is insanely easy and quick to make. The recipe calls for 9oz frozen artichoke hearts that have been cooked according to packet directions. As far as I can tell, these just aren't available in the places I regularly shop in Brisbane. So I used a 400g tin of artichoke (the ones from the tinned vegetable aisle, not the fancy marinated ones from the olive aisle) which I rinsed and drained. I also chopped up the artichokes roughly. The recipe calls for chopped kalamatas, but who doesn't love big juicy olives all through their pasta? So I left the kalamatas whole. I served it with a side of roasted green beans, but I think steamed broccoli or a good green salad would rock it too.

And there ends this current musing of pasta. And I haven't even touched baked pasta dishes or noodles yet - no doubt topics of the future.

Happy (belated) birthday to me!

Last week was my birthday. I have already blogged about the yummy dinner my friends took me to, but I had another special dinner as well. Monday is family night in our house, so for the family night closest to my birthday my brother and my mother cooked a birthday dinner for me. It is quite the novelty to have yummy vegan food prepared for me while I am watching TV!

While I make dinner most nights I am home, whenever there is a birthday or special occasion I always make a special dinner. They get to pick out whatever vegan yummies they want, and then I make it. So this time was my time to choose. I picked something pretty easy (mum doesn't like lots of fiddly cooking, crazy woman). I picked out of Veganomicon, that greatest of tomes.

For the main I chose the Vodka Penne Pasta. I had made this before and it is outstanding. It gets my five star, two thumbs up rating. The tomato sauce is amazingly creamy and fresh. And it is so quick and easy to make, it is just fantastic!

For dessert they made the Berry Coconut Crisp. It is not something I have made before. And I frakked up by hallucinating a bottle of coconut essence in the cupboard and only found out at the crucial moment that there wasn't any. But it was great anyway.

It was a lovely dinner. Thanks to them both!

Tonight I am on call at the clinic. I have spent the last several hours on my computer, discovering insane amounts of new vegan blogs. I also updated my list of blogs, and now all the vegan ones are marked as such. Easy peasy! I am also right now watching a really bad movie on channel 10. But how can I say no a Hilary Duff movie? Followed up by some Season 3 Supernatural on DVD. Heck yeah!

I haven't posted much about what I've been cooking lately. A while ago I bought a book called Tofu 123, which is just chock full or recipes involving - you guessed it - tofu! It's quite a good little book. On Thursday night I was feeling like baking up some tofu, and so I cracked open this book and I made Ilyse's Cripsy Tofu Cutlets With Mustard Sauce. The tofu cutlets were quickly dunked in a sweet soy marinade before being coated in panko and nooch then baked. They were pretty tasty. Not too crispy though. The mustard sauce is a combination of vegan mayo (I used the Vcon recipe), dijon mustard and something called relish. Which, as far as I can tell, is something similar to sweet mustard pickle, so I used that. The sauce is really yummy! I also served it with some mashed potatoes and some roasted asparagus. The asparagus was a mix of regular green and yellow. The yellow had a more subtle taste, but something about it reminded me of tinned asparagus. So I like the green best!

In retrospect, it was kind of similar to a Vcon menu I made earlier this year:



Only the Vcon one was better, because it involved the Chickpea Cutlets of Vcon legend, and also one of the best mustard sauces ever known to man kind!

Got to go and check on some kitties. I hope everyone is having a wonderful Saturday night!

The fabulous foodie holiday

Warning to all - many, many words and photos ahead! So settle in!

I got back yesterday from a brief holiday down at Broadbeach, on the Gold Coast. It was basically an eating extravaganza of fabulous proportions! And thank goodness for the food, as I ended up witha ground floor unit and a fabulous view of the building's pool, and could listen to the soothing sounds of other people in said pool and the traffic outside. Mmm.... restful! Moral of story - don't internet book. Always book over the phone so you know what you are getting!

I got down on Monday afternoon, and immediatey went out for stocking up at The Oasis Shopping Centre. I haven't been down for a couple of years, and I was thrilled to find out that opposite Woolworths there was now a Wray Organic shop had opened up! So I happily went in and impulsed bought up a storm! Below is my booty.



Clockwise from left: Redwood Vegan Thai Style Fish Cakes, Pure Harvest Oat Milk, Spoil Me Raw Vegan Chocolate Chip Ice Cream, organic Swiss Brown mushrooms, Cheddar Style Cheezly and Absolute Organic Beetroot Chips.

That night I headed out to Tian Ran, a fabulous vegan asian restaurant in Mermaid Beach, about 5 minutes drive from my unit. YUM! I had the mixed deep fried entree (curry puff, wonton, dim sim and spring roll), the hot and sour soup (excellent!), chicken in satay sauce on brown rice and, for dessert, lychees in vegan ice cream. The hot and sour soup was one of the best I've had, which is important for me because this is my favourite soup!The chicken is made out of soy protein, and was very nice. And a good peanutty satay sauce as well! But my favourite part was the vegan ice cream with lychees - something I haven't had for ages, but which I truly love! It was all beautifully presented. I wish I had some photos, but I still feel a bit funny taking photos in restaurants.

Tuesday morning dawned, and with it - awesome breakfast number one! I had come prepared for awesome breakfasts, with pancake batter pre-prepared and tempeh bacon marinating. So here it is:



It is Blueberry Cornmeal Pancakes from Veganomicon and Tempeh Bacon from Vegan Vittles, with fresh berries and smothered in maple syrup - YUM! One of the fun things about staying in these units is going from a fully stocked kitchen to a marginally stocked one. So all my frying was done in the one electric frying pan (ick). I enjoyed my first ever glass of icy cold oat milk with this - and I love it! I rapidly consumed most of the pack, I confess.

I spent the entire day reading with my non-view. Very nice to spend all day reading. Come lunch time, and the pancakes had finally worn off. So I made myself a TBLAT:



Tempeh Bacon, Leaves (in this case baby spinach and fresh basil), Avocado and Tomato (in this case a Cherokee Purple variety from my market frolic) with some soy mayo for extra fun all sandwiched between two slices of Sol Bread's Pumpkin And Pepita loaf. YUM!

For dinner I headed down to Threeworlds Organic Pizza Cafe, a vegan pizza shop down in Mermaid Beach. Fabulous atmosphere! And it is a pay what you feel concept. I got takeaway, so I do have photos.



Here's my pizza! I got the large zised half and half. Half was the Margarita and the other half was Potato And Herb. It smelled amazing and tasted great! The cheese is the yellow spiral stuff. It seems to be a liquid cheese that is then baked. Tasty! It also had rocked leaves and sprouts sprinkled all over the top. Scrummy!

I enjoyed some more Heirloom Tomatoes - here is Green Zebra, Yellow Peach and an unknown red variety. Let me just say, the flavour in these tomatoes in mind blowing! Especially compared to the watery red things pretending to be tomatoes in most supermarkets and green grocers.



Threeworlds also has raw vegan desserts! They had two while I was there, so I just had to get a piece of both!



Raw Chocolate Avocado Tart. With my raw vegan ice cream and fresh strawberries. OMG - NOOOOMMMMMMMM! It was so rich, chocolate and decadent!



The other one was a raw coconut, banana and lemon tart. I was not such a fan of this one. It definitely tasted like it wanted to be baked!

Wednesday morning dawned, and it was cold and raining! I prepared another awesome breakfast:



Here we have scrambled tofu (firm tofu, baby roma tomatoes, baby spinach leaves, basil leaves, parsley leaves, mushrooms, kipfler potatoes, nooch and apple cider vinegar), more tempeh bacon, fried mushrooms and a slice of pumpkin bread with avocado. All washed down with some take away fresh juice - apple, carrot and ginger (the best combination ever!).

Eventually I decided to leave the dry hotel room and venture out for some lunch at Magic Apple Wholefoods down in Burleigh Heads. Yummy! This is a vegetarian place with a lot of vegan options. Because of the cold and rainy day, I opted for a lentil and mushroom pie, which came with a homemade tomato sauce. They have a great selection there - pies, pasties, a selection of yummy hot meals (thai curry, morrocan bean stew and dhal were all on offer) and some of the largest and yummiest wraps ever seen! They also have sweet stuff!



This is my piece of Orange Almond Cake. It had a kind of cream cheese icing. I took this down to Point Danger, on the QLD/NSW border. It is one of my favourite and prettiest places ever. Don't believe me?

Here is the point itself from up above on the lookout.



And here is the beach next to it, also from the lookout.



The weather abated to allow me to walk down to the actual point itself.




Then I headed back up, just in time as it started raining again, and spent a couple of hours reading in the car, listening to Hamish and Andy on the radio and watching the beautiful view. I stopped off form some more Tian Ran take away on the way home. Tonight I had some lovely Shanghai Pan Fried dumplings, which were truly tasty. For the soup I had the Sweetcorn and Vegetarian Chicken Soup, which was a bit lacking in sweetcorny taste to be honest. The star was the main - beef in black bean. They make their beef using soy protein and mushrooms, and it is delicious, melt in your melt stuff! For dessert I enjoyed some of their sago with coconut milk and palm sugar with soy ice cream. Even though I had this at the unit, I forgot to take photos - doh!

My final morning. Before check out, I had a quick breakfast snack of vanilla soy yoghurt, berries and maple syrup. YUM! This was just to boost my energy, before packing up, checking out and heading off to One World Love Cafe for the breakfast proper. I had the sausages (really nice, I think some sort of nutmeat), tomatoes and toast with a banana smoothie. I also had a lovely chat with Margaret, one of the ladies working there. This is a great, zen little place and I think my favourite of the trip! They also do group meditations there. It is abeautiful place too, with a lovely courtyard and some of the nicest bathrooms you ever shall see. Did I mention the food was great?



Then home and back to the real world. For dinner last night, I had some vegan fish and chips. Well, to be precise Redwood Vegan Thai Style Fish Cakes, chips and more yummy tomatoes.

If you are still with me, congratulations and thanks! It was a great holiday of eating, and I would be happy to drive back down just to eat at any of these places. Check them out if you are in the area, or if not, drive up or down and check them out anyway!

So, today is my birthday, so more food will be forthcoming soon!