Recipe Round-Up: 500 Vegan Recipes

Welcome back! It is a post MoFo world (though for most of us I think the reading and commenting will continue for some time), and I am inspired and committed to keep up with my blogging, especially in the lead up to VidaVeganCon in May. Will my good intentions carry through? Who knows. I hope so!

As mentioned, I have a squillion photos of recipes I have made from cookbooks stored on my computer, so I am going to try and do some regular recipe round-ups on here. I have a lot of non-Robin Robertson books as well! Today's book is 500 Vegan Recipes by Celine Steen and Joni Marie Newman. This book is a great volume, but one that I have not made too much from yet. I need to rectify this!

Minestrone with Simple Cheezy Sauce: Classic minestrone comfort soup, full of lots of vegetables and beans and pasta. The cheezy sauce really makes it something extra special. The cheezy sauce is thick and savoury, based on a heft dose of nooch (love it!). The minestrone soup said it served 6, but I got four servings out of it.
Rating: Minestrone :), Sauce :)



I used some of the leftover sauce to make this awesome Hawaiian Pizza. Pineapple, slices of Wheaty Space Bars, and black olives. I know black olives aren't traditional on a Hawaiian, but I love to add them anyway! The sauce makes a great alternative to grated vegan cheese on a pizza!



Seitan en Croute with Creamy Boiled Leeks and Soppy (Brown Gravy): I had some friends over for dinner and wanted to make something a bit fancy. The seitan en croute is certainly impressive! The seitan itself came together quickly, and is baked in a loaf first before being cooled and wrapped in pastry. The recipe calls for one pound of puff pastry, but I used 2 sheets of Borgs puffed pastry to enclose the loaf properly. The creamy boiled leeks were a bit lacking in flavour and not really that creamy. The recipe calls for two cups of stock, but when you look at the rest of the ingredient quantities this would be way too much, so I only used one cup. You also need a really big leek. The gravy was great, and tied it all together nicely. Lots ofmushrooms and savoury flavours. All served with broccoli for greens.
Rating: Seitan :), Leeks :|, Soppy :)





Barbecue Baked Beans with Caraway Onion Cornmeal Bread: This is something I made quite recently, inspired by the need to use up some grape jelly in my fridge. Yes, grape jelly is the secret ingredient in this barbecue sauce. The sauce coats a mix of red beans, black beans and pinto beans. The beans are in the side dishes chapter and say they make 8 servings, but for a main dish it is four servings. I served this with some cornmeal bread, which had a nice flavour but was very dry and crumbly. Also served with lots of kale.
Rating: Beans :), Bread :|



Pumpkin Spice Hot Chocolate: Full disclosure, this is meant to be Pumpkin Spice Coffee, but I hate coffee so I made it as hot chocolate. I might have put a bit too much cocoa powder in, because the pumpkin flavour was very slight. It said to use 1tsp of espresso powder, but I had used 1TBS of cocoa (figuring that espresso powder was very strong in flavour compared to cocoa, I don't know if this is correct). I had this for breakfast with some peanut butter on fruit toast.
Rating: :)



Banana Muffin Tops: 'My muffin top is all that, wholegrain, low fat, I know you wanna piece of that, but I just wanna dance.' If you have no idea what I am on about, go immediately and buy 30 Rock, and prepare for 7 seasons of awesome (Tina Fey, I love you!). While you are watching, make yourself a batch of these amazing muffin tops! I actually bought a muffin top pan, and this recipe allowed me to try them out. These are amazing, they are like giant cookies, but they are muffins.
Rating: :D



Walnut and Currant Veganzola Balls : I made this for my friends who also had the seitan en croute, and this was their favourite part of the meal. It isn't really cheezy, and sometimes it can be hard to make it come together properly (it likes to crumble). It is made from crumbled tofu with miso, garlic, liquid smoke, walnuts and currants. Let it sit for a while to let the flavours mellow and meld, then serve on some crackers.
Rating: :)



Cilantro Cucumber Salad: This is very refreshing, a great summer treat. It is also a great way to use up left over coriander leaves (cilantro). I mixed this through some rice with a bit of mango salad, for a lovely lunch.
Rating: :)



Baked Chimichangas: Stuffed with tofu, beans and cheesy salsa, these make a very tasty dinner. I served with some Tofutti Sour Cream, some salad and some sort of red rice (I have no idea what that is!). I needed to use 8 flour tortillas (rather than the 6 the recipe calls for) to fit in all the filling. Speaking of filling, these will fill you up and make you very happy!
Rating: :D



Cream-Stuffed Cookie Cupcakes: Fine crumbs of Oreo cookies, silken tofu, and whole wheat flour (plus some other things), make for some pretty special cupcakes. It is hard to find wholemeal pastry flour in Australia, so I used wholemeal flour. I thought that this gave the cupcakes a fairly strong wholemeal flour taste, but no one else noticed. Bonus points for these cupcakes - because you bake them with a whole cookie on top, you don't need to fuss with icing or decoration. The perfect solution for when you are in a rush.
Rating: :)



S'mores Crispy Treats: I made these for a bake sale, and they used up the last of my Rice Mellow cream that I had brought back from the US. Marshmallow fluff, chopped chocolate, puffed rice cereal and chunks of digestive cookies (I don't have access to grahams here) make a sweet but very sticky and fragile mix. It is simply mixed together and then chilled, so these tend to crumble apart the moment you take them out of the fridge!
Rating: :)



Peanut Butter Blondies: Easy and fast to make, an with a great peanut butter taste, I made these for a PB-loving friend. They come out very flat, but they have enough flavour to make up for it. These have raw sugar and light spelt flour in them, so they are practically health food.
Rating: :)



Cute Kitty Photo of the Post



This is Steve, who was in boarding a little while ago. Check out that cute little face!