Granola Round-Up

How about another crunchy granola round-up. It's been a while since I've made any, I've been leaning towards the much easier option of buying some, but here are some really fun flavours I made last year. Pretty much all of these were served over some sort of soy, almond, or cashew yoghurt and sometimes I added fresh fruit if I had some around.

Pecan-Sweet Potato Granola from Sweet Potato Soul by Jenne Claiborne: This granola is delicious! Though the sweet potato flavour in it, coming from grated sweet potato, is fairly subtle. It has both brown sugar and maple syrup in it, putting it on the sweeter side of granolas, but it has a bunch of cinnamon to make it warming and welcoming. I found out as I was making it that I didn't have quite enough pecans for the recipe, so I topped it up with some pepitas.
Rating: :D



Homemade Granola from Chloe's Vegan Desserts by Chloe Coscarelli: This is in the dessert for breakfast chapter, but even with a hefty amount of maple syrup is more a traditional granola rather than anything particularly desserty. I have seen recipes for ones with chocolate chips and marshmallows in other places! But this recipe is super easy, can be scaled up or down, and tastes great. As well as oats it has almonds cinnamon. It called for raisins as the fruit, but I don't love raisins so I used a mix of sultanans and cranberries instead.
Rating: :)



Stove Top Granola from Forks Over Knives The Cookbook by Del Sroufe: I hadn't made granola not in the oven before. This method was easy, however it didn't crisp up the way it does in the oven and while it was yummy, it was also very sticky! It uses date molasses as the sweetener and binder here, which was lovely and not too sweet. Surprising, given how sweet dates themselves are! I used a blend of mixed fruit (like for Christmas cakes) and cranberries. I made 1/3 of a recipe for 3 serves.
Rating: :)



Chai-Spiced Almond Granola from The Easy Vegan Cookbook by Kathy Hester: This granola uses a lovely mix of spices to give it a warming glow. It uses a combination of flax-seed mixed with water and oil to bind it together. They call for coconut oil, gross, I used canola oil instead. The mix of the spices and crunchy almonds makes it a lovely way to start the day.
Rating: :)



Sesame-Apricot Granola from Vegan Bowl Attack by Jackie Sobon: I just realised this is a recipe from a bowl cookbook but it is the only one I photographed not in a bowl! Ha. This is a really nice combination, with a mix of oats, buckwheat, coconut flakes, almonds, apricots, and seeds (including sesame seeds and chia seeds... I could do without the latter in there, they were weird). All coated in a tahini mixture. I had to add a smidge of hot water to my tahini mix to get it thin enough to be able to stir through and coat everything. I also had to bake it for slightly longer in my oven. It came out in wonderful crunchy crumbles! I made a whole recipe, which said it served 6 but really makes 3 generous serves.
Rating: :)



Homemade Hippie Cereal from Minimalist Baker's Everyday Cooking by Dana Shultz: This is a combination of granola mixed with puffed rice cereal. The granola part is gluten free, so no oats. It is all based on a mix of nuts (I used almonds and pecans) and seeds... including chia seeds again. I just really only like them under specific circumstances. I also added some raw sunflower seeds to the first baking stage, rather than adding rosated ones later on. It also has dried blueberries, and I added extra cinnamon as well. Confession time: I forgot to set a timer for this after I put it in my oven, so it baked for however long it took for the lovely smell to remind me that I had something in there! But it all worked out well. Once cooled, you mix it with the rice cereal. It is pretty fun to eat!
Rating: :)



Crunchy Citrus Toasted Granola from Cooking With Kindness (Edgar's Mission): A bright and tangy take on granola, using orange, lemon, and lime zest in mix. I made a half recipe for this, and used a blend of rolled oats and rolled rye. It also has coconut flakes, almonds, pumpkin seeds, sesame seeds, dried dates, and dried apricots. I left out a the linseeds (aka flaxseeds) and the dried figs (I don't like figs), and I used canola oil instead of coconut. Served with some orange segments, it was a refreshing start to the day.
Rating: :)

Midweek Munchies

Hey, these midweek munchies are posting midweek!

So many burgers these days, so many of them trying to be super meaty. Which is not really my jam, but yet if I see them on sale I feel compelled to try them. As long as they aren't full of coconut oil, which a surprising number are. This V2 burger looked meaty, but wasn't really that meaty. Not compared to something like the Beyond. But still a bit meatier than I would want to eat in general. I just made some pretty simple cheeseburgers with them.







Here is another leftovers into a toasted sandwich combination. This one using roasted eggplant, pizza sauce, and smoked Miyokos... so it was almost like and eggplant parmy sandwich except with bread instead of the eggplant being breaded.



These fruit cake slices are vegan! However, they also are a bit dry.



This toasted sandwich had Tofurky Oven Roasted Slices, Miyoko's smoked cheese, spinach, and some sort of tart red jam... I can't remember exactly what it was.



I bought this fancy bottle of ginger Kombucha, which was nice.



Finally, some sick day ramen. This had a really nice flavour. It would be easy to add some extras to this to make if a bit more filling and fancy, but I was sick and just wanted something easy and savoury and warm.

Litha 2020 and Lammas 2021

The summer festival sabbats. That I marked with food, as I tend to.

Litha (aka Summer Solstice) (21st December 2020):

Normally I make a little menu plan to make something special for each sabbat. Litha 2020 I did not. It was less than a month after Dim Sim passed, and I was still deep in the extremely non-functional part of my depression and grief. In fact, I realised I didn't make any recipes for over a month. It was all about eating the easiest thing I could, and when (if?) I was actually hungry. Food for Litha tends to include red and yellow foods, bread, and fruit and vegetables. At that point, one thing I would eat fairy regularly was my 'depression sandwich', which was just bread with mayo, sliced tomato, and turmeric seasoning salt on it. I was also eating some apricots, because I love them and it was the season. And I was drinking a lot of juice, like this carrot, apple, and ginger juice. Turns out that this depression lunch worked out perfectly into Litha themes! How about that.



Lammas (2nd February 2021):

By Lammas I was starting to cook a bit more regularly again, if only to give me something to do. Lammas is the wheat harvest festival at the peak of summer, and foods typically include corn, grain, breads, seasonal fruits and veggies, and berries.

Quick Herb Bread from 1000 Vegan Recipes by Robin Robertson: I had briefly planned to spend my day making an elaborate and delicious looking braided yeast bread recipe that I saw on IG. But reality set in and I just did not have the spoons to deal with that. Instead I made this Quick Herb Bread. The original recipe calls for dried basil, thyme, and marjoram but I took the suggested variation of using celery seed and dried dill.... with a lot of extra dried dill. This ended up being a very dense loaf, almost more like damper (as Australian thing). Overall a bit meh. But it did the job.
Rating: :|



Corn Salad with Basil Pesto Aioli from Vegan Bowl Attack by Jackie Sobon: This seemed like a nice way to celebrate corn. I made a half recipe, but I still was a little low on corn so I added some white beans as well. A great addition! I also used celery instead of raw red onion. The basil pesto aioli was really lovely.
Rating: :)



I also served it with some grape tomatoes and sliced cucumber.



I went super easy for dessert, with a Nanna's Vegan Apple and Rhubarb Pie,some fresh blueberries, and some of the Pana Boysenberry Cheezecake ice cream I mentioned in my last post. I was planning on having fresh blackberries rather than blueberries, but just that week suddenly blackberries were no where to be found!



(% 1000 Vegan Recipes blogged: 29.9%)

Midweek Munchies

It's Sunday, but these midweek munchies don't obey the laws of time.

The world was abuzz with the news... and by world I mean Brisbane vegans and the news in question was that Totally Vegan By Charlie chocolates were going to be landing at The Green Edge. This South Australian based company had been making vegan versions of some all time favourite chocolate bars. I got Bubbly Jaffa (orange Aero Bar), Fat Cats (KitKat), Slackers (Snickers) and Buggy Wheels (Wagon Wheels). They also have Bubbly Mint (mint Aero) and Choc Deck (Top Deck) that I did not get, and since then they have also released Marsssss, Twicks, and Honeycomb (both explanatory). The chocolate here is kind of mey, it is sweet and kind of thick and soft. So it really relied on the flavours to bring it home. My least favourite was the Bubbly Jaffa, more because a textural issue because while the orange flavour was nice the whole thing was just very soft. Following it up was the Buggy Wheels, which suffered from a too dry biscuit layer and not enough filling. The penultimate flavour was the Fat Cats. This wasn't in two fingers, like a KitKat, it was a block with squares you broke off. But they were filled with delicious crunchy wafer. And finally, the winner of course was Slackers. Peanuts and caramel and nougat.





When you are already buying all this chocolate, what is a few more sweeties?? Both of these flavours are Alter Eco are amazing, I have had them many times before. I also got some Peanut Butter and Berry Jam Jubes by Australian company The Red Balloon. I don't know how they did it, but wow they really got peanut butter flavour into a jube. Though to be honest, this is not my favourite way to have peanut butter and jam. The jubey texture and the flavour just don't really match up in my brain.



From things I bought, to things brought to me! My friend Kim made some homemade vegan soy yoghurt, and delivered some to me at work. It was excellent! Thick and tangy. I took it home and made breakfast with it the next day, just with some berries and pepitas and a drizzle of maple syrup added on top. Yum!



With so many new vegan meats coming out, I picked up these Chicvee and Beefvee strips from V Plant Based on clearance. They freeze great! And they are frequently on sale for half price, which is even less that these ones! Look out for them in some upcoming meals.



Here's a using random stuff up toasted sandwich I made for lunch one day. It had cheese and some leftover vegetable ragu. A fun way to use up those leftovers.



And this lovely sandwich, that had some avocado, smoked Miyoko's cheese, panfried smoked tofu, mayo, and tomato.



Finally, some experiments. As long time readers know, coconut fat is my enemy. I can have a little bit, but I have a low tolerance so I end up feeling really awful if I eat too much. And coconut is such a popular ingredient in vegan dairy foods these days! There are some things I can eat, but I don't know until I try and the cost tends to put me off being willing to take that risk. However, I found some Pana Ice Cream on super clearance sale for AU$4 a tub (normally AU$12), so I thought sure. I'm willing to lost $4 and give this to someone else if it doesn't work out. I am happy to report, it did work out! This joins So Delicious in coconut-based ice creams that I can eat! I still can't eat a heap of it, but I can definitely have a nice little dessert snack bowl. I had the Peanut Butter and Raspberry flavour, which was awesome! I have also since got the Boysenberry Cheezecake flavour.



I had a similar mindset when I got this tub of Nakula Strawberry Yoghurt on clearance for $1. Nakula traditionally has been all coconut based, but this one is a blend of coconut and almond. Alas, it was too coconut fatty for me. But hurrah, it was only $1!

Midweek Munchies

You know the drill. Here we go!

This is a stir-fry I made using a ginger-miso sauce recipe a friend shared on her IG stories. It was salty and gingery, which was nice, with a bit of brown sugar to even it out. I made mine with tofu, broccoli, and eggplant and served it over rice. I made a bit too much sauce, you can see it is kind of swimming in it, but no complaints about that.



These are some fun snackballs I found, a nice change from the chocolate and nut based ones. These both have really nice flavour, though they are kind of gummy and smooshy in texture. There is also a banana and spinach flavour I haven't tried yet. I recently found a bunch of the mango and carrot ones on super marked down short dated clearance sale, and I bought all the ones they had left. A nice score!



This is a burger I made from random things I had that needed to be used up. Just a regular burger bun, a Veef burger patty and some leftover satay sauce. I also added mayo, spinach, grated carrot, and pineapple. This reminded me of an satay sauce and salad burger I used to get from a vegan place years ago.



Every now and then I will find a package of vegan gyoza on sale, normally either vegetable or mushroom filled. I love to steam them, put them in a bowl on top of some spinach, and cover them in a mix of plum sauce and black vinegar. It makes for a very easy and delicious lunch. Pretty sure I've shared some similar photos before, but here it is again!

Speaking of things I have shared before, here is another baked potato for lunch! I think this one has tinned baked beans (which I always mix some nooch into), spinach, ketchup, and bacon bits.



I bought a Suzy Spoon Vegetarian Butcher Lasagne that I found at some random vegan-friendly shop. I can't remember the price, but it was not cheap but certainly better value than the cost of some other vegan ready-made lasagnes. It was a solid amount to serve as well. Taste wise it was... okay. It tasted a bit too much of just tomato sauce, and a bit dry. I don't think I would buy it again, there are other lasagnes I prefer, but it was fun to try it.









Finally another one of these silly soups. This one was 'Sweet Beets' aka the red soup, with beetroot, sweet potato, and again with the amaranth and hemp seeds. Stop putting seeds in soup please. But seeds aside, it was a nice taste.

Recipe Round-Up: Bowls of Goodness

Hi friends, here is a recipe round-up post. I had it sitting in drafts mostly written for ages, so I just added a couple of other ones I had made so I could post it. This is the second half of my 'recent' round ups from this book, the first half I posted on the 22nd of November... who would know that five days later my world would crumble so completely.

Anyway, please enjoy this post of recipes rounded up from Bowls of Goodness by Nina Olsson, which is a very good book. I realised that this is quite a long post, so feel free to just scroll down and look at the photos as you go. You can see my other posts from this book here.

Asian Coleslaw: I had some wombok (aka napa) cabbage to use up, and happened to have all the ingredients on hand for this. The slaw itself is made from white cabbage (wombok in my case) and apples, but I also added some carrot. It is tossed with a coleslaw dressing that includes peanut butter and lime for a bit of a difference. The dressing combined with the shredded apple made it all very liquid. I served this with some roasted green beans and some BBQ sausages.
Rating: :)



Gado Gado: The peanut sauce in this recipe called for both tamarind and lime, and as a result was really sour. I wonder if the recipe should have read one of either. I added some leftover marinade from the tempeh (which was garlic/ginger/soy/maple) to try and smooth out the sour, plus some extra agave, but it was still so sour and the peanut taste was lost. The rest of this bowl has marinated tempeh, black rice, green beans, toasted coconut, bean sprouts, papaya, and coriander. The bowl itself was good, but the sauce needs a major reworking.
Rating: :| due to sauce



Masala and Millet Bowl: Millet is one of those grains that doesn't get enough love, but I am here to love it. In this case, the millet is mixed with roasted vegetables (I used cauliflower, radish, carrot, and cherry tomatoes) and chickpeas. The vegetables and chickpeas are tossed with spices (I left out the chili powder) before roasting. The bowl is topped with avocado, nuts or seeds (I used pepitas) and a herbed yoghurt sauce. The avocado and sauce were essential, as it would have been a bit dry without it. But lovely when all mixed up. I also served this over some baby spinach.
Rating: :)



Laksa Noodles: It's your girl, here making laksa without chili and not as coconutty! This recipe includes making your own laksa paste, and seems a bit fussy but once you have made the paste and prepped the rest it comes together very fast. Obviously I left out the sambal oelek in the paste, to get all that gingery garlicky lemongrassy goodness without the spicy, so I understand that I made it not really a laksa, but it worked for me. The noodles also have tofu,mushroom, broccoli, green beans, and beansprouts on top. My amounts were a bit different to what the recipe called for, but overall it added up to about the same. I also used light coconut milk further diluted with some water in the broth, so I could enjoy the creamy without making myself sick. The noodles are topped with a quick pickled cucumber, that was also meant to have onions in it but I left them out.
Rating: :)



Slutty Pasta: I love puttanesca. It is tasty and normally comes together very quickly. This one is a bit more time intensice, as it involves roasting some tomatoes, onions, and garlic that are blended to make the sauce with basil and olives (and chili, which I left out). I didn't add any extra pasta water to the sauce, as it was already plenty of sauce. And I am glad I didn't as the sauce could have been a bit richer as it was so adding water would have made it quite dilute. As it was I had about twice the amount of sauce I needed, so I froze the rest for an easy meal at a later time. I added some kidney beans to this to bulk it out, as well as some kalamata olives and capers, and topped with nooch.
Rating: :)



Royal Korma: Another recipe where you make your own paste, and another instance where I left out the chili!The paste uses toasted almonds, but next time I would just use almond meal for ease. The paste is cooked with red onion, coconut milk (it calls for 800mL, so I used a mix of light coconut milk, oat milk, and water), and tiny diced carrots and cauliflower (I used a bag of ready made cauliflower rice). Served with brown rice, a simple raita, naan bread, and an apple and onion pickle (that I of course left the onion out of). This made big serves, but wasn't super filling.
Rating: :)



The Loyal Lentil Chilli: An old standby but given a few fun twists. By now you know, this was not actual chilli, because I left out the chillies! My chillies are chill in the sense of having no heat. As well as lentils, the chilli also has butternut squash (which I love and gave a really nice sweetness). It also has coconut milk, so of course I did my as described above dilution trick. Do chillies have coconut milk> Does that really make it more of a curry? Oh, I also used some tinned lentils because making things more convenient is a good thing some days. This was served with a simple yoghurt sauce, a quick pickled cucumber, rice, and coriander. It was a lovely combination.
Rating: :)



Back To The Roots: This bowl is a comforting mix of broccoli mash, roasted veggies, sauteed kale, and carrot, tahini, and miso dressing. I used half the amount of broccoli and got three serves. The broccoli is mashed with tahini, lemon juice, and hemp seeds, so isn't very smooth! The roasted veggies are sweet potato and red onion as well as including some pumpkin seeds in the mix. The bowl is also served with some 'clean salad'... whatever, anyway, I only used spinach for my salad (not sprouts or herbs), which was lightly tossed in sesame oil and vinegar. But the real star was the sauce, which was SO YUM! Worth making on its own.
Rating: :), but :D for the sauce alone



Pulled Jackfruit Bowl: This recipe uses a homemade BBQ sauce to cook down jackfruit and shiitake mushrooms. It ended up being very liquid, so I had to simmer it enthusiastically for several minutes at the end to get the sauce to thicken up. No one wants watery jackfruit! The bowl is also served with some coleslaw (which was nice but had a strong taste of olive oil in the dressing), and some sweet potato fries. I also served it over some baby spinach. A nice combination.
Rating: :)



Herbed Potatoes: I made a half recipe of this lovely side, which is roasted baby potatoes tossed with baby spinach and a dill pesto sauce. The pesto sauce was meant to be mostly based on chives, but all that raw chive action would not be good for my tummy. So I used extra parsley and some baby spinach in place of the chives. I also used some Vegenaise in the pesto in place of the optional creme fraiche. I roasted the potatoes a bit longer in my oven to get them nice and brown on the outside. Served with some store-bought BBQ tofu for a nice dinner.
Rating: :)

Midweek Munchies

I have so many random foods to share with you saved to my computer, so let's keep on keeping on.

A number of vegan 'fresh' minces are now available, and this is the Made With Plants one that I picked up on sale on day. I froze half for use in a future recipe from a cookbook, and used the other half to make some lunches. While the half I froze was designated to make meatballs, the other half I just fried up to try it out. As you can see, it kind of clumps together when you crumble it into the pan, so it didn't really 'brown' all that evenly.





I used it to make some baked potatoes for lunches and use up some other random bits and pieces. The first was a bolognese baked potato, which had a bit of leftover pasta sauce, some diced roasted eggplant, and baby spinach. And topped with some FYH parmesan.



The next day I made a cheeseburger baked potato, which also had some cheesy sauce and nutritional yeast, and was topped with some shredded lettuce and the last bit of Coles Vegan Burger Sauce in the bottle.



Here's another one of those vegan Nutrish soup flavours, this one was the purple one called 'Tickle Me Purple'. As you can see, it has tomato, purple carrot, hemp and amaranth seeds, and acerola (apparently a berry rich in Vitamin C according to Google). Honestly, the seeds were just pointless and made it kind of weird and gritty. They were not needed. Otherwise it was OK.



I had another packet of that pudding, this time chocolate flavoured. Still with the gross stevia. I used some soy cream to blend it up this time, rather than oat milk, so it ended up a lot thicker. Served with some strawberries, but I still added some more strawberry jam after this photo to help with the stevia taste. If you need to cover up the stevia taste with sugar, then maybe just use sugar in the first place!



Kingston Biscuits were one of my favourite biscuits from my pre-vegan days, and no one has ever really quite made a decent vegan version. So I was excited to see these Princetons available at the supermarket. Unfortunately, it ends at the name. The biscuit part is too dry, probably a side effect of being gluten free. And the chocolate in the middle was too sweet and kind of grainy. A miss for me.



Finally, this Vietnamese Pho sipping broth. It is basically a tea bag, but with pho broth ingredients inside instead. A very clever idea! Often when I am a bit under the weather, I wish I could just drink some pho broth. They also have some other flavours, though most of them have chilli in them. And they were also fairly pricey, given that there is just two little bags inside. The instructions say to steep for 3-5 minutes then discard the bag. Ignore this. Steep for longer, and then get a spoon and gently press the bag to get all the flavour out of it. Otherwise it just tastes like slightly pho-scented water. You need to press that bag to get the flavour out and into your mug properly. Then it is a lovely savoury broth.