Recipe Round-Up: Vegan On The Cheap

Vegan On The Cheap is one of my favourite cookbooks by Robin Robertson. It has a great range of recipes, with a eye to being budget friendly in mind. She also has some options for 'splurging' if you feel like adding a little extra. I've posted about this book a number of times, and you can see those posts here.

Mu Shu Burritos and Thai-Style Pineapple Rice Salad: This is a nice combination (suggested in the weekly menu section of the book) of a warm burrito and cool salad. The mu shu filling is shredded seitan (I just chopped it finely), carrot, and wombok aka napa cabbage (which I accidentally turned to mush because I had my food processor shredding blade the wrong way around so it got the fine grate treatment... sigh) in a lovely hoisin-based sauce. The filling was quite liquid, I suspect due to my unfortunate cabbage smooshage, so I used a slotted spoon before putting it on the wrap. The recipe says it fills eight 7-inch tortillas to serve 4. I was serving two people, and I used a large wrap for each of us and had plenty leftover. I scaled down the salad a bit, and used jasmine rice that had been cooked, frozen,and defrosted. I suspect the texture of the rice would have been better if I had used freshly cooked and cooled, but we use up what we have. The salad has pineapple, carrot, peas, coriander, and peanuts in it. I left out the green onions and chile. I think the salad would also work well turned into fried rice! Certainly I combined the leftover salad with leftover burrito filling and heated them up for dinner the next day and it was great.
Rating: Burrito :), Salad :)





Comfort Loaf with Creamy Mushroom Gravy: Winter calls for 'meat'loaf and gravy. This comfort loaf was delightful, with onions, carrots, celery, tofu, beans, oats, walnuts, and breadcrumbs (I used panko because they were there), as well as other bits and pieces. This made a large and satisfying loaf. It stuck a little the the bottom of the loaf tin, so grease it extra well, but it is delicious. Also, leftovers made fabulous sandwiches! I served it with the Creamy Mushroom Gravy. I made a 1/2 recipe, which was enough for three serves. This is a great savoury gravy, and is easy to make.
Rating: Loaf :D, Gravy :)



Peanutty Pumpkin Stew: This comes together easily, using a tin of pumpkin puree as the pumpkin base for it. It also has other vegetables, peas, peanut butter, tinned tomatoes, and kidney beans. I left out the curry powder and the chiles, but I added some spinach and about 3/4 cup of brown rice.
Rating: :)



Call It Cassoulet: Delicious beany tomato stew! This recipe uses white beans (I only used two tins rather than three), diced tomatoes, vegetables and herbs to make a very satisfying cold weather dinner. There is the option to add some chopped pepperoni (recipe in the book), I used some chopped Field Roast hot dog instead, which was a lovely addition. It also is topped with some toasted croutons. I used one slice of wholemeal bread, which was enough for two servings. They were nice and crunchy. Overall the stew made four serves (I kept two as leftovers, which is why I didn't make croutons for all the serves because they would just go soggy), served over some baby spinach.
Rating: :)



Skillet Hash: Onion, carrots, potato, seitan, herbs and spices. A lovely, quick, tasty dinner. The potatoes need to be cooked before adding, and I used my favourite new trick of cooking them in the microwave using the potato setting. For the seitan, I used a leftover bit of red seitan from Viva Vegan, which had it's own nice seasonings to add. I took the splurge a little option of adding a bit of FYH mozzarella, though I only had a sprinkle left in the bag so it didn't get too cheesy. I also added in some baby spinach. Served with ketchup, which was great. Avocado would also be awesome on this.
Rating: :)



Seitan and Mushroom Goulash: This recipe is in the slow cooker chapter of the book. Somehow, when I was planning to make it, I totally missed this important fact until it was 4pm in the afternoon, so I delayed its making until the next day when I had lots of time to give my slow cooker some action. It smelled wonderful! It has onion, seitan, mushrooms, and sauerkraut (I used the Polish kind in a jar), as staples of paprika, caraway, white wine, tomatoes, and sour cream. I used both the Tofu Sour Cream recipe and the Simple Simmered Seitan recipe from the book. The seitan recipe is easy and gives a nice, savoury seitan that goes well in lots of different dishes. It is a forgiving recipe, as I mucked it up twice (firstly by not adding enough gluten flour, so I had to add more in after I had mixed in the liquids, and secondly I had boiled the cooking broth before adding it). The sour cream is based on silken tofu, and the tofu taste is quite strong initially but then mellows with time. I made a whole recipe of the sour cream, which claimed it would make 2 cups, but it only made one and a half. The goulash was nice, but even better as leftovers once the flavour had time to meld. Served over spinach fettuccine and baby spinach.
Rating: Goulash :), Seitan :), Sour Cream :)



Cute Kitty Photo of the Post



Please enjoy this very fancy Instagram Flat Lay-style photo of the top of Dim Sim's head and her cute little ears.