VeganMoFo 2017 #22: Recipe Round-Up: The Great Vegan Grains Book

22nd: Unconventional grains – Cooking with freekeh, buckwheat, sorghum, etc – try something you wouldn’t usually!

I enjoy using all sorts of different ingredients, and I love playing with different grains. When The Great Vegan Grains Book came out, it was a natural fit for me. This book covers all sorts of grains! There are your old standards like rice, polenta, barley and quinoa, as well as a huge array of others - freekeh, farro, millet, buckwheat, sorghum, rye... and a lot of something called einkorn. I have never found einkorn, and I can only imagine the cost of it if I ever did, but the book has plenty of suggestions for alternative grains to use in most recipes.

Cost is also an issue when playing with fancy ingredients. Years ago, I used to be able to buy boxes of freekeh at Coles for a pretty reasonable price, however since it has become a 'super grain', it is now harder to find and much more expensive. There has been a bag of cracked freekeh sitting at the health food market near my work for many months now... it costs $16 for 350g. No thank you! So it becomes a matter or finding some good deals on certain grains where you can. I wanted to play around with some new to me grains for this challenge, and I was very happy to find both sorghum and rye berries at super reasonable prices last month.

So let's see what I have been making in this mini-round-up for MoFo. I haven't blogged about this book before, so there aren't any other posts to check out, but there will be more in the future. I have chosen recipes with four different grains.

Tempeh and Buckwheat Bowl: I was sold on this bowl because of the peanut sauce, plus the earthy buckwheat and tempeh. It sounds like a great combination. The sauce is nice, but you need at least a double batch to make it saucy enough for me. I added a splash of veggie broth and Braggs to the tempeh and vegetables while they were cooking to give a bit more flavour and so it wasn't too dry. I got three servings from this.
Rating: :)



Roasted Radish Freekeh Bowl with Mustard Miso Sauce: Holy yum this is good. I had never roasted radishes before, but I am a convert of it now. The radishes are roasted with the broccoli, served on top of cooked freekeh, and then topped with a delicious sauce. I also added some chickpeas to bulk it up a bit, and got two very filling serves. I also made a double batch of the sauce, it was so good.
Rating: :D



Rye Shakshuka: This is a tasty, warming dinner. Cooked rye is added to a tomatoey sauce and topped with eggy fried cubes of tofu. The sauce is meant to have capsicum in it, I used carrots. I also decreased the heat by using just 1/4 tsp of harissa rather than the full 2 tsp. I followed the suggestion of making this with double the rye, rather than serving with bread, as I wanted to have a decent amount to get leftovers. As you can see, even with double the rye it was still very saucy! I liked the rye a lot, it was a nice and chewy grain.
Rating: :)



Hearty Sweet Potato Sorghum Curry: The recipe says to cook the sorghum first until it is completely tender, with no chewiness, but after an hour mine was still a bit chewy. I ate it and it was fine, I liked it. This is a comforting curry, I made it mild by using 2 tsp of mild curry powder and just a sprinkle or harissa. It gets thick pretty quickly, so I had to add a bit of extra liquid. I had already added some water by diluting out a 270mL tin of light coconut milk to 400mL (the recipe actually calls for full fat, but not for my intolerances), so I added some oat milk as the extra liquid to keep it creamy. I also added some peas, and lots of cilantro (rather than just using the cilantro as garnish). This made 3.5 smallish serves.
Rating: :)



Cute Kitty Photo of the Post - Month of Sahara



Sahara absolutely loved her Kickaroo! I allowed her to release the wild cat within, and she would grip it and chew it and kick it with so much joy.