Recipe Round-Up: Vive Le Vegan

Viva Le Vegan! is Dreena Burton's second cookbook. But one I have not used very often. I decided recently to change that, so here are some of the things I have made. This is the first time I have done a recipe round-up for this book, but I have posted about one other recipe from it before here

Molasses Baked Beans, Miso-Curry Roasted Potatoes, and Creamy Orange Poppy Seed Dressing: This was a delightful dinner! I made a half recipe of the baked beans, and streamlined it by using 2 tins of white beans instead of cooking them from scratch and baking for four hours to get finish cooking them. This has ketchup and blackstrap molasses in it, which gave it a great flavour. I cooked mine for an hour and a quarter in total, but because my beans were already fully cooked it ended up being very liquid. So I uncovered it after the first half an hour of baking and also increased the heat to 200dC for the last 20 minutes and it thickened up. I'd suggest reducing the amount of water in the sauce if you are making these with tinned beans. The roasted potatoes were so delightful! They have miso and curry paste (I used red curry paste, but I decreased the amount). I actually halved the amount of potatoes, but made the full amount of coating. It is a very thick coating, so I did add a smidge of hot water to loosen it up so I could easily coat my potatoes. I finished off the meal with some steamed green beans and the dressing. The dressing is creamy thanks to silken tofu! I used garlic powder instead of fresh garlic, and used maple syrup as my honey alternative. This had a lovely sweet citrust flavour.
Rating: Beans :), Potatoes :), Dressing :)



Creamy Raspberry Oatmeal: This says a full recipe will make 3-4 serves, I made a half recipe and got a reasonable sized serve. This is made with frozen raspberries, which gives it a beautiful pink colour. It has a bit of nutmeg and allspice in it for some lovely flavours. I also stirred in a bit of LSA meal (that is linseed, sunflower, almond meal), and I topped it with flaked almonds and pepitas.
Rating: :)



Hemp Power Shake: This is a very simple smoothie, consisting of non-dairy milk (I took the chocolate option - mine was an almond milk), frozen banana, and either hemp butter, hemp seeds, or hemp protein powder. I used hemp seeds. I also added a sprinkle of cinnamon, because cinnamon. This was not too rich, which was good, but also was not very filling. I served it with a persimmon, which was a nice contrast.
Rating: :)



Diane's Stork Muffins: The story with this recipe is that Dreena's sister delivered her a batch of these 'baby' muffins to her when she had recently given birth, and they were a great snack. So I made them for my friend that had just given birth. I made a half batch, for 12 small muffins. The recipe uses a blend of oat, kamut, and barley flour, and I just happened to have all of those in my cupboard because I collect and hoarde flours. They also have dates, coconut, and cranberries in it as well as spices (I forgot the fresh nutmeg, what a dope, but made up for it with cinnamon). These are tasty little snacks, but are very soft and a bit crumble especially when first out of the oven. You need to let them cook completely before trying to take them out of the tin.
Rating :)



Creamy Hummus: A perfectly good hummus recipe. It has the usual suspects of tahini, lemon juice, and garlic.
Rating: :)



Chickpea Ratatouille: This is the sort of dinner where you mix a bunch of stuff together, and pop it in the oven (I uncovered it for the last 15 minutes of baking). Easy peasy. I used zuchinni instead of capsicum, garlic powder as my garlic had gone gross, and I used agave as the honey alternative. I made a half recipe for three serves, served over baby spinach and mashed sweet potato.
Rating: :)



Veggie Stir-Fry with Spicy Almond Sauce: The sauce for this is based on almond butter, but I removed the spicy part of it by leaving the crushed red pepper out of it. I also used carrots instead of capsicum in the veggie saute, which also had celery, zucchini, broccoli, silverbeet, and mushrooms (I had a blend so I used shiitake, black fungus, and oyster). I used a bit more of the veggies than specified as well, to use stuff up. The other part of this is some tofu, marinated in rice vinegar and soy sauce and sauteed to brown and crisp before adding the the stir-fry. This was great, with nice big serves and tons of veggies.
Rating: :)



Fudgy Brownies: These brownies live up to their name! They have some ground chocolate chips in the batter, that melt during baking. I cooked for an extra 10 minutes.
Rating: :)



Cute Kitty Photo of the Post



Dim Sim would like to know when you will be giving her scritches.