Friday, June 19, 2009

Winter dinners

Winter is the best time of year in Townsville for fresh local veggies. It’s finally cool enough and dry enough for flowers to set into fruit and vege, and since Townsville gets an average of 320 sunny days per year, plants tend to go well here.

Thus, our dinners have been chock full of veggies lately. They’ve also been very comfort food-ish...

Vegan mac and yeast with peas and carrots, and topped with whole meal bread crumbs.

Served with a leafy green salad with tomato, cucumber, raw corn and tofu fetta (from the Uncheese cookbook).

Lentil soup with tomatoes, carrots, potatoes and green peas, and topped with toasted sunflower seeds.

Pie, veggies and salad. The pie is filled with a mixture of eggplant, potato, carrot, rocket and radish greens, tied together with vegemite gravy. On one side of the meat pie are garlicky green beans. The other side is potato and sweet potato baked with kalamata olives. And the meal was finished off with a salad of lettuce, tomato, cucumber, avocado, alfalfa sprouts and roasted garlic. This was a very filling and satisfying meal.

For a wintery dessert I made the Banana Crumble from The Joy of Vegan Baking. I followed the optional suggestion and added some frozen mixed berries to the banana filling. This recipe was pretty good, but if I make it again I will use less sugar, because this was sickly sweet. I’ll probably also use a different recipe for the topping—Vaala’s crumble recipe is hard to beat.

12 comments:

Vaala ◪ said...

Wow, that food looks awesome - perfect for our cooler days of late. I especially like the soup (and the sound of vegemite gravy - is there a recipe for that?).

Oh man, making me want crumble...badly! Perhaps this weekend!

nora said...

I actually just bookmarked this recipe to make in the near future, so i'm grateful to know i should cut back the sugar! i love colleen's recipes, but i find that they often have too much sugar. we cut the sugar for her zucchini bread in HALF and it's still really sweet!

x said...

Your winter warming dinners look fantastic, I need to start making warmer meals for lunch as salads just don't cut it when it's 14C and pouring with rain. I really love the look of the lentil soup and the mac n cheese!

Bianca said...

Townsville?! Is that the real name? That was the name of the town on the Powerpuff Girls cartoon...sorry, I'm a dork.

The food looks delicious. Especially the "meat pie" and sweet tater/olive bake.

K said...

It all looks awesome.

I think it must be crumble weather, I have made two in the last couple of weeks and then we also had some at press club. Will need to check out the valla's crumble recipe, thanks!

Amy said...

Nom!!!!

TB said...

wow, that pie meal looked incredible!!! well done ;D

Amy said...

Mmm awesome winter meals! I LOVE the pie dish and that crumble looks amazing!

Groover said...

I have lentil soup planned for tomorrow night. :-) What a great idea to top it with some seeds. I have to try and incorporate more seats into my diet. One question: I bought buckwheat today and tried to find some good vegetarian recipes for it but couldn't find any. Do you have any buckwheat (the actually grains not flour)recipes by any chance?

Groover said...

seeds - how the hell did I turn this into 'seats' ... LOL

Theresa said...

Vaala, for vegemite gravy I just dissolve about a teaspoon of vegemite into 2 cups of (hot) water and add a teaspoon of soy sauce. Then I cook up some olive oil and flour for a few minutes and whisk in the vegemite stock and cook till it's thick. It's also good with mushrooms in the mix.

Bianca, it is really called Townsville. I went to NZ with two other friends from Townsville last year and the kiwis at the conference decided we were the powerpuff girls. I was buttercup, I think. In real life, I think the powerpuff girls live in Townsville, North Carolina though.

Groover, I've never cooked with buckwheat but I'll have a look through some cookbooks and see if I can suggest any recipes in the next few days :)

urban vegan said...

You've sure been eating well.

It always makes me trip up to realize it's winter down there. But then again, your winters are fairly warm, aren't they?

Glad you're taking care of yourselves!