the tropical vegan

Jack Fruit Extraveganza

2012-02-02T17:09:00.001+10:00

In December, Andy and I picked two jack fruits. We cooked them, and turned them into three delicious meals. There was a curry, a Vietnamese-ish salad, and BBQ "pulled" jack fruit. All were seriously yummy.

I've posted about the process over at Offbeat Home, so hop along to there and check it out!

WIP it.

2012-02-01T06:51:00.003+10:00

I'm working on a few different crochet projects at the moment, so I thought I would join the Work in Progress Wednesday phenomenon, which started two years ago and I'm just doing for the first time now. I never claim to be at the front line of trends.

First up, we bought an ugly-as ceramic elephant from the second-hand shop, and I have plans to spray paint it some exciting colour. While I figure out what to do with that, I'm making a totally awesome, not-at-all-Nanna-like doily to sit underneath it.

I think the giraffes and the elephant will be friends. I hope they will, anyways.

The pattern for this comes from this ravelry pattern.

My second project was inspired by a book I got from the library called Bring Colour to Crochet by Renate Kirkpatrick. It has patterns for 64 different squares, which in the book are all put together into a single, very diverse throw rug. I liked the book so much I bought a copy to have for myself, because squares are a very useful thing. And I'm making a blanket, but not the same as in the book. Instead, I'll be repeating the same few squares and making a bit of a pattern of my own. First, I had to stock up on enough of each colour to finish the whole blanket.

And so far I have 6 finished squares (well, they mainly still need to be edged), and one about halfway done.

The thing I like about making a blanket from squares is that I don't have a big, half-done blanket all over my lap. If that was the case, I wouldn't be able to work on it until winter, because it has been pretty disgusting the last few weeks. Humid, hot, no-pants weather.

Sheese Louise

2012-01-28T13:03:00.000+10:00

A few months ago, I tried some Kingland Soy Cheese, which was just horrible. My post about it prompted Susan, in Brisbane, to very kindly offer to send me up some Sheese, which is shelf-stable so post-able. I was getting ready to go overseas, so I asked for a rain check, and eventually Susan and I engaged in some package swappering shortly before Christmas.

The package I received from Susan had way more than just Sheese in it. It also had some vegan gummy sour snakes, some Primal Strips soy jerky, and a Go Max Go Joker bar. All things were massively appreciated - gummy candies have always been my favourite, and were one thing I was very sad to give up upon adopting vegetarianism. Candy bars - hello, who doesn't want a vegan snickers? But I love a good savoury snack, and vegan jerky made Andy and I think seriously about how we can make some in our dehydrator.

But the Sheese was really the star, and for a few weeks was the gift that kept giving. I was pretty happy to see that it is grate-able.

For our first try of it, we put it on pizza, along with some BBQ sauce, grilled onions, and vegan bacon bits (which we souvenired from the US). The Sheese didn't melt, as such, but since it was grated and we didn't layer it on too thick, it didn't matter much. It did add a really nice layer of flavour that our normal cheeseless pizzas don't have.

The smoked cheddar flavour is exceedingly good on crackers.

And it made a tasty, if not melty-gooey, toasted cheese sandwich.

The plain cheddar found homes atop nachos, more pizzas, mixed into our Christmas breakfast hash browns, and in a wrap with some BBQ "Pulled" Jack fruit.

Susan - thanks so much for all of this! Vegan bloggers really are the best :-)

Faux Injera

2012-01-22T18:53:00.002+10:00

I love Ethiopian food, and Andy and I have been eating it semi-regularly. It's also a really good thing to cook for guests, because a lot of people haven't tried this cuisine, or at least they don't have it often. Plus, it's yummy, so people tend to like it.

In an effort for authenticity, I bought some very expensive teff flour ($12 for 500 grams!!) in November so I can make injera. But at that price, I'm afraid to screw it up - so I haven't actually opened the pack yet. I am aware that it's been more than 2 months, and I should get over my fears and just dive in. But in the mean time, we had people coming round for dinner and I was serving mesir wat, and I wanted something *like* injera to serve with it. Here's what I came up with - easypants, gluten free, and spongy like injera. They were missing the sour undertones of teff-based injera, but these chickpea breads were a good accompaniment for those of us who haven't tackled proper injera yet.

1 c. chickpea flour
1 c. water

That's all. I told you they were easypants. In a bowl, mix these two things together. The batter should be like crepe batter - thinner than pancakes, thicker than milk.

Heat up a non-stick skillet over medium-low heat. Brush the pan with a tiny bit of oil. The idea is to cook these quite slowly, so they cook through (because raw chickpea flour tastes terrible) but don't get crispy. Using a ladle, pour a scoop of batter into the pan and immediately spread it out with the back of the spoon. Cook it until bubbles appear and the top is basically completely set. Just like cooking pancakes, but without the browning.

Flip the bread over, and cook for another minute or so before transferring it to a plate.

I had two plates - one for the bread that's just come out of the pan, and one for cooler ones.

After removing the first bread from the pan, start a second one. When it's ready to flip, roll up the one on the plate and put it on plate 2.

Hopefully that makes sense. Letting them cool just a bit before rolling makes them more pliable and less likely to crack.

Once the breads are all cooked, and then fully cooled, wrap them up and store them until the rest of the meal is ready.

Around the world in... Ceilings

2012-01-18T14:24:00.002+10:00

I am not a short person, at 5'7, but Andy is still almost a foot taller than me. In addition to repeated requests from strangers to get things from high shelves while we shop, and being asked ALL THE TIME "How tall are you?!", his 6 foot, 6 inch stature means that I spend a lot of my time looking upwards. Aside from Andy's lovely face, I also notice a lot of ceilings. Here are some!

At the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, DC, the ceiling is epic - about 5 floors above the ground-level atrium, this is the view upwards.

I liked it so much I took two photos.

At loads of temples in Hong Kong, giant spirals of incense hang from the ceiling - even when the ceiling is temporary scaffolding and some fabric.

At the Po Lin Monastery in Hong Kong, they've replaced incense with all of these lanterns and banners.

The church at Dublin Castle has angry angels glaring down at you from on high.

This old cathedral in Schaffhausen, Switzerland, had the tallest ceiling but almost no decorations. Good for instilling a feeling of dread and despair, I think.

At a protestant church in St Gallen, Switzerland, the ceiling is the most awesome blue I've seen.

And when you pop next door to the Catholic cathedral, things are just ornate as hell (see what I did there? hell, church...)

Looking for Lunch

2012-01-14T17:32:00.000+10:00

During the week, our lunch routines are pretty well established. Andy has a salad sandwich, while I eat leftovers from dinner the night before. What we struggle with, though, is lunch on the weekends. I don't find salad sandwiches all that fulfilling, and after 5 days in a row Andy is ready for a change. We are usually pretty stumped about what to eat, often falling back on standards like noodles (for me) and leftovers (for Andy, usually eaten while standing over the bench top). But, sometimes we do get creative, and I want to document them, mainly as a reminder to myself about the options.

When we feel like wraps but don't have tortillas on hand, we use sheets of nori instead. This one is filled with a chickpea salad. It's harder to bite than tortilla, but full of iodine, so at least there's that.

Sometimes we creatively combine a series of leftovers - here we have leftover hummus, some puy lentil salad, and a few veggies in a tortilla.

20cent tofu makes a reasonable lunch, especially on a bun with veggies - here, with shaved sweet potato, grilled onions, cucumber and tomato.

Shaved sweet potato makes another appearance in this easy pants salad - with cucumber and sun dried tomato, and splashed with balsamic.

Andy came up with the idea for these "sushi crackers" - hummus flavoured with nori, wasabi and rice vinegar, with pickled ginger and biscuits.

Those are a few ideas, but I want MOAR. What are your favourite lunch ideas?

In west Philadelphia, born and raised...

2012-01-10T18:48:00.000+10:00

After NYC, we spent about 24 hours in Philadelphia. Since our time there was short, and since we didn't really know where it was or have anything in particular to see there, we didn't get to West Philadelphia. But I did have the Fresh Prince theme song in my head for pretty much the whole time.

In Philly, we stayed at the Alexander Inn - a bit of a splurge, but not too much, and it was in a really great spot. And it was a boutique (not a chain!) hotel, and it had free breakfast and a 24 hour snack bar. So fruit and bagels for everyone!

This isn't our hotel. It's just a picture.

Upon walking the five or so blocks from the bus station to the hotel, we stumbled into what looked like a street market. Closer inspection revealed that it was actually OutFest. We dropped our bags, stopped at a few stalls, and walked on to Govinda's, a hare krishna restaurant that is not the usual Indian-food buffet, but rather a delicious takeaway shop with really good vegan chicken cheese steaks ($7.95). We had a funny experience there when the man taking our order asked if we wanted to dine in or take away. I said, "I don't know, are there any good parks nearby?". He responded, incredulously, "What for?!".... Uh, for eating in. Then he understood, and recommended Rittehnhouse Square, so we walked there and shared a sandwich.

Only, on the walk, we just so happened to pass a vegan bakery! And how could I pass that up? So we looked at all that Sweet Freedom had to offer, and settled on a choc mint sandwich cookie ($3.75, and gluten free).

We spent the day looking at Philadelphia's old stuff, skipping anything that had a queue or an entry fee. I'm proud to say that Philadelphia was probably the only place where we didn't get hopelessly lost in our wandering. That William Penn must have known what he was doing when he designed the city!

Occupy Philadelphia

We walked through the Reading Terminal Market, which was huge and had piles of produce.

And when we came back to our hotel, we found that the subdued, street-market-esque OutFest had turned into a massive street party.

After some free condoms, an invitation to Vote Obama!, and some poking through the stalls, it was time for dinner, with Dynise from Urban Vegan.

Dynise was one of the first two people to ever start reading and commenting on my blog, and hers is one of the first blogs I ever started reading regularly myself. That was about 6 years ago. Then I tested recipes for her first cookbook. And, we're facebook friends. So Dynise is one of those people who I feel like I've known forever, even though we only met in person this one time. She recommended we eat at the Memphis Taproom, which is a vegan-friendly restaurant/bar. Apologies for the fuzzy photos, but I had a Smoked Coconut Club, which consisted of grilled lemon garlic tofu, smoked coconut, and tomato herb mayo. The smoked coconut was a revelation! It was so bacony - it was crispy, smoky, and just a bit fatty. But virtually unprocessed, so much nicer than storebought vegan bacon substitutes. Seriously good.

Andy and Dynise (I think) both had the Chicken Fried Portobella sandwich. The chips that came with both sandwiches were thin, handcut (or at least, they looked it), and were really good.

For dessert, the three of us shared a slice of vegan peanut butter pie, which was a bit homemade and not *fantastic*, but was very good. And, hey! Vegan peanut butter pie at a non-vegan restaurant!

Thanks, Dynise, for the driving tour, and for dinner! And then our trip to Philly was basically over, and it was on to DC...

Total Request Live

2012-01-04T13:38:00.002+10:00

When I was in year 10 or 11 at school, we took a day trip to NYC. As this was around about the year 2000, and we were all around about 16 years old, we felt like we just *had* to stand outside the MTV studio during the show TRL. Carson Daly waved at us! This post is my version of answering your requests. I tend to be bad at (1) posting recipes and (2) responding to specific comments on this blog. I'm trying to change that! So in this post you will find recipes for tattie scones, olive & basil dip, fig & pecan stuffing, mango granola, and candy cane slice. Apologies in advance for the often vague-ness of my recipes - we tend to put in a scoop of this, a shake of that, and a bit more of these.

Tattie Scones
This Scottish breakfast staple is actually much easier than I thought it would be. They're not that good for you, but they sure are tasty. Just be sure that your mashed potatoes don't have milk in them, because that makes them too wet.

1 c. mashed potatoes
salt to taste
2 Tbsp. olive oil (or to taste)
1/2 c. plain flour

Mix the salt and oil into the mashed potatoes and adjust the flavours until you're happy. Add flour and mix until fully combined. It should be a soft dough, but not too sticky. Add more flour, if you need to. Divide the dough into three balls and press them out with your hands onto a well floured surface, until they are a circle about 1/2 cm thick. Cut each circle into quarters and dust both sides with flour. Heat a frying pan with a thin layer of oil over medium-high heat. Fry tattie scones until golden on both sides. Serve straight away, or refrigerate and reheat, or freeze for later use.

Olive & Basil Dip
A combination between tapenade and pesto, in creamy dip form. Obviously not for olive haters, but Andy and I really loved this.

1 bunch of fresh basil
1 small drizzle of olive oil
1 small clove of garlic (more, if you don't mind raw garlic)
1/4 c. pitted kalamata olives
1/3 c. vegan cream cheese

Using a mini chopper, blender, or food processor, or by chopping everything *reallly* finely, mince up the basil, garlic, and olive oil into a paste. Pulse in olives, so they are still a bit chunky. Add cream cheese and blend until all ingredients are combined. Good with crackers & veggies.

Fig & Pecan Stuffing
Our stuffing recipes tend to be variations on a theme - bread, dried fruit, and some kind of nut. Because bread gets mouldy in Townsville before it gets stale, we dry out our bread by leaving it open in the fridge for a night or two. This year we used white bread, but other years we've used whole grain. Basically, use what you have and it will be good.

~10 slices of stale bread, cut into cubes
1 c. soy milk, other non-dairy milk, or veggie stock
drizzle of olive oil
1 small onion, minced
1 tsp. freshly ground black pepper
some fresh thyme (we have a plant, and I think I cut three or four stems? maybe a teaspoon of leaves once they've been taken off the stems?)
1 celery stalk, minced
1 carrot, grated
6 or 8 dried figs, chopped up
1/3 c. pecan crumbs, toasted

In a bowl, soak the stale bread in the milk. In a frying pan, gently saute the onion with the black pepper and thyme, until the onion is translucent. Add the celery and grated carrot, cook until they are tender, and then remove from the heat. Add the veggies to the bread, and then stir in the figs and the pecans. Stuff into something, or press it into a baking dish and bake until it's crunchy on top.

Mango Granola
This recipe is another variation on a theme, and is my daily breakfast. I 'cook' the granola in my dehydrator, but the oven way works, too. Granola is a good way for soy milk making folks to use up okara, but if you don't have okara, try using some kind of yogurt, or perhaps a weeny bit less non-dairy milk, or maybe just more fruit puree. This size recipe fills up all five dehydrator trays - for a version that can fit onto two oven trays, just cut everything in half.

6 c. oats
1/2 c. rice flakes
1/2 c. barley flakes
1/4 c. wheat germ
1/4 c. shredded coconut
1/4 c. sunflower seeds
1/4 c. sesame seeds
1/2 tsp. salt
1 tsp. ground ginger
1/4 - 1/2 c. brown sugar
1 c.-ish dried currants

1 1/2 c. wet okara
1 c. pureed mango-banana blend
3 Tbsp. orange oil (made by putting the peels of an orange into some rice bran oil and fridging it until you want to use it - or, for orange haters, just use regular oil)

In a very big bowl, mix up all of the dry ingredients. In a jug, stir together the wet ingredients. Then combine the two, using your hands to make sure every bit of dried stuff gets coated in the fruity okara. For dehydrator granola, spread onto sheets and put into the dehydrator at 45-ish degrees, for about 4 hours, turning the trays 90 degrees every hour.

To make it in the oven, spread onto two baking trays and cook in a 160 (275F) oven for 60-90 minutes, stirring every 15 minutes, until it reaches your preferred level of crunchiness.

Candy Cane Slice
I was inspired, last year, to make Vaala's recipe for mint slice, except for utilising candy canes instead of peppermint extract. This is a variation on that, with the candy canes left crunchy. Andy doesn't love that about this slice - he would prefer a smoother texture. For Christmas, my mum got me a ginormous multi-function mix master thingie, so I used that for the mixing. Before I've done everything by hand, and it was just fine. It's a good way to use up that box of candy canes that you bought on special after Christmas, without remembering that you don't love to eat candy canes.

Base:

125g margarine, room temperature
1 cup brown sugar
1 cup flour
1 tsp baking powder
1/4 cup cocoa
1 cup shredded coconut

Heat oven to 180, line a slice tin with baking paper. Cream together the margarine and brown sugar until fluffy. Beat in the rest of the ingredients until just combined and then press into the prepared baking tin. Bake for about 15-20 minutes. Let cool.

Filling:
1/4 c. vegan cream cheese, at room temperature
3 c. icing sugar
1 Tbsp. non-dairy milk
10 candy canes, chopped

Beat cream cheese until it is soft, then slowly incorporate icing sugar. Drizzle in milk until you get the consistency of icing, and mix in the chopped candy canes. Spread this onto the cooled base and chill again.

Topping:
100 g. dark chocolate (we used Lindt 70%)
1 Tbsp. soy milk
2 candy canes, chopped

Melt the chocolate and soy milk together in a bowl over steamy water. Pour over slice, spreading to the edges. Sprinkle with candy canes. Fridge again, until ready to eat. Slice into slices, but this is tastiest if you let each piece come to room temperature before eating.

So that was a lot in one post, but I will try to be more efficient at this in future!

2012

2012-01-03T15:09:00.000+10:00

Happy 2012, everyone!

They say what you do on New Year's Eve is what you'll be doing for the year ahead, and if that is the case, then Andy and I will be doing a lot of cooking, a lot of eating, a lot of reading, some movie-watching, and just a little bit of drinking.

Here are some of the things we ate, over the course of an afternoon and evening, on the last day of 2011.

Candy cane slice.

Crackers & Dip. I find champagne goes really well with sharp flavours, like this basil and olive dip.

We also had some cheese & crackers - smoked cheddar sheese, to be exact, which I received as part of a package swap with Susan (which I will post about soon). This is really yummy, nicely textured vegan cheese.

I made sushi! It was my first time making it, and it really wasn't as daunting as I expected. My only tip is to have wet hands, so the sushi rice doesn't stick so much. I made my sushi with brown rice, following the recipe from Celebrate Vegan by Dynise Balcavage, except filling it with zucchini and tofu.

The results were a bit bland, in both colour and flavour, and next time I will have zippier fillings. But, I can make sushi!

The best part of the night was easily when we ate ice cream sundaes. I bought some Soyatoo! Whipped Cream on my birthday, back in November. Because it was so freaking expensive, I wanted to use it on only the most perfect dessert. I decided, more than a month ago, that it had to be an ice cream sundae. But it was only this week that the right confluence of ingredients found themselves in our home. Some vanilla spice ice cream in the freezer. Some Macho Fudge Sauce (from Urban Vegan by Dynise Balcavage) in the fridge. Some sprinkles in the pantry. And the result was everything I expected, and more. So, so good.

That wasn't all we cooked on New Year's Eve, though. We also made some preparations for breakfast the next morning. I made these parsley breakfast sausages in the frying pan, because I couldn't be bothered steaming them.

And we made some tattie scones. These are essentially mashed potato flat breads, which we ate every day for breakfast in Scotland. And they are easy to make!

So with a bit of reheating, opening a tin, picking some spinach, and chopping some mushrooms (including this well-endowed specimen)...

We had our first meal of 2012. It was good.

My "resolutions", if you want to call them that, are simple. I plan to wear gloves when I was dishes, to make my own laundry detergent, and to keep my Flickr account up to date. I'll add a brief promise for the next week or so to this: I will post a recipe for fig & pecan stuffing, and for mango granola, because Hannah has asked for them. Remind me if I forget.

Vegan Christmas

2011-12-30T18:54:00.000+10:00

It seems appropriate to end 2011 with a summary of our Christmas, because if I leave it until 2012 I will feel slack (even though I'm still posting about our travels which happened in OCTOBER, but whatevs).

Our Christmas promised little in the way of either excitement or decoration - it was just Andy and I hanging out in Townsville, and we had a stack of novels to keep us company, and the limit of my cheer was this little display on the table (which is a major step up from most years).

For dinner, which Andy and I have on Christmas eve, we decided to be modest so we could save room for dessert.

There was a yuba-wrapped seitan roast, made as per last year's recipe, except this year stuffed with a fig & pecan stuffing, which was wonderful. There were some oven-roasted potatoes, which Andy declared "tates awesome" (get it?). There was a crunchy noodle cole slaw - you know the recipe on the back of the crunchy noodle pack, with a sesame-soy dressing. And there was cranberry jelly, from a jar, which I resisted buying because the homemade version is much better, but it was on special and Andy can't resist a bargain.

As per our plan, there was room for dessert, in the form of tropical trifle, but which I forgot to photograph. Here is a photo of my first go, but the Christmas version was made in a rectangular baking dish - partially because that's how Andy's mum does it, but mainly because our usual trifle bowl was under a friend's house and we'd been too slack to pick it up.

On Christmas morning, I woke to put on some bread - cranberry fig bread, a dried fruit combination which, to me, seems more festive than dried mixed fruit, which we always have on hand. I found a recipe for vegan panettone, but decided to just make it like a regular loaf in the breadmaker. Only, when the beep signalled our bread finished, the result was flat in the pan (despite loads of yeast), it was reluctant to come out, and when it did, it collapsed into a heap:

The reason was because it was still pretty doughy in the centre. We ate it anyways, in chunks, though my lofty goal of having cranberry fig french toast on Boxing Day was dashed.

The rest of Christmas Breakfast centred on mango mimosas - champagne with melty mango sorbet.

And on food, too. Hash browns with smoked cheddar sheese and (vegan) bacon bits. More cranberry jelly. Creamy breakfast mushrooms. And see the chunk of bread? Also, Vegan Dad's breakfast sausages. I made a half batch of this lightly sweet but mainly savoury recipe, but made the mistake of steaming them wrapped in baking paper, rather than foil - to me aluminium foil seems wasteful, and the whole thing about aluminium and health... But the baking paper wasn't tight enough so they were a bit flat, and not as dense as they should have been. But still good.

The rest of the day involved cocktails, potato chips, more trifle, novels, It's a Wonderful Life, and leftovers.

Boxing Day saw Nacho throwing up all day, and not eating. One of the throw-ups involved a 20cm piece of shoe lace. She perked up a bit after that, but then got sick again, so when she was still sick on Tuesday morning, we took her to the Emergency Vet - because it was the Christmas Day public holiday, you see, and the regular vet was closed.

While we worried about Nacho, we occupied ourselves by making some mango-beetroot spring rolls. I originally planned to have these for Christmas, but the Christmas Day public holiday is close enough, no? In rice paper I put 20cent sweet chilli tofu...

And mango...

And a big pile of grated beetroot, grated carrot, and rice vermicelli.

Then I rolled them up.

And after we heard that Nacho's surgery went just fine, and they removed a 60cm piece of shoe lace from her guts, we ate our spring rolls for dinner.

Nacho came home the next night, full of her last dose of pain meds, and with a shaved arm where the IV had been, which I think makes it look like she has her sleeve rolled up.

And with a shaved pink belly.

She's done a lot of laying around since Wednesday night, which is good, but she's also back to eating lots, licking herself, and purring adorably.

Happy end of 2011 to everyone, and see you next year!

Some more things to do with mango

2011-12-29T10:59:00.000+10:00

We've been busy the last few days, between Christmas, and medical emergencies of the feline variety (now sorted... Nacho ate a loooong shoelace and had to have it surgically extracted, but will be home 1 hour from now, which makes me happy). So I will get to holiday-ish posts, eventually. But, for now, I leave you with some photos of mango-creations. The season seems to be tapering off for us here, but there may be some alternative varieties at the markets in the coming weeks.

We recently grabbed this stellar bargain: fill a bag for $4.

That bag was filled, to the brim.

Most of the mangoes were very ripe, so we peeled and blended up something like 14 of them, mainly for fruit leather.

Some of the blended mango went into mango-ginger muffins.

Another scoop of the mango, blended with banana, went into the mix for granola. Served with, of course, more fresh mango on top.

Fresh mango, fresh pineapple, fresh mint, and Cointreau makes an easy but fancy grown-up fruit salad.

In preparation for a mango-coconut upside down cake, my mango slices were so pretty. Then, I poured in the coconut cake batter and baked.

When I poured, the prettily arranged slices got messed up. Woops.

In the world of savoury foods, Andy made this "mango three way" (his name for it, not mine). Mango jerk seitan, with grilled mango cheeks, and a mango noodle salad.

Throwing mango in to a chickpea curry at the last minute is pretty delicious.

Mango, pineaple and avocado with soy & sesame dressing made a very tropical, Asian-ish side to the very traditional, Western-ish meal of seitan schnitzels with potato mash.

Eating the Big Apple

2011-12-22T11:19:00.001+10:00

New York City is kind of it when it comes to vegan eating. Sure, there are lots of great cities for vegan food, but from all the blogs and magazines and other things I read and here, NYC has a vegan version of ANYTHING you could possibly want. For reference, we used Super Vegan's restaurant finder.

We could have eaten in restaurants/street carts/takeaway shops for breakfast, lunch, dinner and snacks in between and still not even come close to sampling the variety that New York offers, but we had just come from Scotland and Ireland, where we had no kitchen. So we (mainly Andy) were getting a bit restauranted out. So we did eat out, but we also took advantage of the other thing NYC offers that we are not used to -- good, vegan-friendly grocery stores. So, how did we do?

This is the fat cat who lived in the apartment we rented.

Her name is She-Ra and she makes Nacho look puny.

We went to Whole Foods on our very first day in NY, because we saw it and I couldn't resist. And I'm glad I didn't! It is pretty incredible - so many things, like regular grocery stores, but mainly organic, and/or local, and/or hippy-ish versions of regular groceries. So fun! Like this Road's End Mac & Chreese which we ate with mushrooms on our first evening in NYC, and which I posted about earlier.

In Central Park, we sought out the Good to Go Organics food truck for vegan hot dogs. They serve Smart Dogs brand, with a variety of toppings. We ordered the Two Dog Deal, one with saurkraut & mustard, and one with vegan chilli, for $14 including chips & a drink. These were okay, but not the best ever.

In the East Village area we went to Viva Herbal Pizzeria. There were so many choices to make - crust, toppings, cheese, size... we opted for the October Special, because there was a 15% (I think?) discount. The Vegan Picante, plus Daiya cheese. Large, please. (Because an Australian large pizza is usually enough to feed Andy, just.) With a whole wheat crust. We should have picked up on the fact that most people ordered one slice only, sometimes two. Not a whole pizza, not even for two people. Because, here's the thing: a large pizza is massive! And the toppings weren't light - soy meatballs, capsicum, and red onion, all mixed up together into tomato sauce, and topped with so much cheese. Our first experience with Daiya, and our first soy cheese in a long time, this was a bit rich, and a lot of food. But that didn't stop us (mainly Andy) eating the whole pizza! Which was a little disappointing, because it meant no room for the vegan desserts they had on offer, like whoopie pies, tiramisu, and cannoli. What was I thinking!

In Greenwich Village we queued up at Murray's Bagels - I got multigrain with tofu cream cheese, and Andy, for some reason, ordered one with jam. I had enough cream cheese on my bagel to share, lucky for him.

In the East Village (again) we caught up with a friend from high school at Curly's Vegetarian Lunch. I forgot to snap photos, but this was what I think of as classic greasy spoon food. There were loads of choices, but I went for a nostalgic cheese burger with curly fries, and a root beer float. Andy had, I think, the Avocado & Jack burger. Both came with Daiya, at our request. Again, too much food. This time I couldn't finish mine, probably because I basically had dessert before and during dinner, in the form of my root beer float. This meal is where it started to sink in that American portion sizes are SO MUCH bigger than my belly has gotten used to in the past 6 years of living in Australia.

In the Upper West Side, we had some delicious Ethiopian food at Awash Restaurant. We went for combo 3, the veggie platter, which was everything veggie they have, served with injera. The photo is shockingly bad, but the food was shockingly good. Ethiopian food is seriously the best, especially when it's served with proper injera.

$24 for both of us, plus extra for some St George, the beer I drank way too much of when I visited Ethiopia in 2005.

Saturday morning saw us head back downtown, really near Washington Square Park, where we met up with VKO for brunch at Sacred Chow. Again, so many choices! I opted for Banana French Toast, described as "A thick slice of our banana pound cake grilled up warm and crisp, with blueberry sauce." Really, though, this was basically a piece of cake. For lunch. It was awesome.

I couldn't finish it all, but Andy came to my aid. Even after finishing all of his Peppersteak Hero (which VKO had as well): "Grilled seitan strips, peppers, onions, w/bean cheese sauce, served on toasted whole wheat baguette. Served w/a side of home fries". As good as the food was, though, it wasn't the best part of the morning - the best part was meeting VKO, whose blog I've read for years and who is such a lovely person.

In the Upper West Side, we went to Trader Joe's, which was kind of the yin to Whole Foods' yang. It was crowded, and small, and it felt like they didn't have much of anything besides junk food and organic dead animals. We were overwhelmed, and quickly grabbed some Tofurkey Italian sausages for dinner, along with some mushrooms and pitta bread. The sausages were a lot like homemade seitan sausages, even with the chewy-stringy seitan texture to them. But for some reason (possibly all the food we'd already eaten), I could only eat half my dinner before I started to feel a bit bleh.

So. That was how we ate in NYC. I'm seriously disappointed in our lack of dessert, ice cream, and so on. But, we did pretty well, I think. Plus, it gives us plenty of excuses to go back and eat more. Though next time, we will have to stay closer to the downtown area, since all of the awesome-est food was there.

New York, NEWWWW York!

2011-12-21T10:56:00.002+10:00

From Ireland we flew to New York (via Manchester and Zurich, on annoying SwissAir with an annoying teenager in front of Andy trying to lean his seat back ALL flight long, and annoying flight attendants telling Andy it was the kid's "right" to lean back, even though Andy's legs are just barely long enough to squeeze into the seats and his knees bump up against the seat in front of him no matter how straight upright he sits).

We stayed at another AirBnB place, as far uptown as you can get before you hit water, in Inwood. It was a great apartment, but because it was a bit far from the NYC action, it meant staying out ALL DAY instead of popping in for an afternoon rest before heading out again for the evening. That, in combination with jetlag, and our propensity for going to bed early at the best of times, meant that we never "went out" at night in NYC. This seems to disappoint some people, but I was okay with it!

What we did do in NYC was a whole lotta other stuff. We started at the bottom of Manhattan - the financial district.

We had a squiz at Occupy Wall Street, which was massive and impressive and inspiring.

We rode the Staten Island Ferry, ate a sandwich, and then came back.

It's free! And look what you see:

We walked through China Town, Little Italy, and the Lower East Side.

I like the golden croquembouche next to the Buddha.

We went to Times Square, because, I know, but it's what you do when you're a tourist in NYC! Our primary goal was to find cheap theatre tickets, but those suckers are still damn expensive, even when they're half off! So we skipped the theatre. And we skipped cheap comedy, after getting bullied by a guy trying to give us a "great deal" to comedians "of the same caliber" as the hilarious (sarcastic NOT) Wayans Brothers.

I pretended to be Tina Fey at Rockefeller Plaza.

But I kinda liked Lego Atlas better than the real one.

We window-shopped along 5th Avenue. Even the mannequins are hipsters.

Andy ate a chilli he found growing in Central Park. I don't know how wise that was.

Also, Central Park!

And Chrysler Building.

And UN - which was such a let down. After insane security, and leaving a backpack after it had been scanned and searched, we found that you had to pay something like $15 each(!) for a tour. So we looked in the bookshop and then collected our backpack and left.

The Union Square Green Markets were similarly expensive, but much more fun. And, free samples!

Highline Park is totally cool.

The Museum of Natural History misleads you by saying "entry is free, donation only", but then making you pay at a cash register, with people who look disappointed in you for paying less than the suggested amount even though the museum closes in an hour and there's no way you can see all the dinosuars let along everything else.

Washington Square Park was all fenced off - no getting close to the arch! Or the fountain!

Coney Island was sunny, and sandy, and totally surprising.

(And of course Andy touched the water - his first touch of the Atlantic!)

But the most exciting part of all (besides the food, which I will give its own post), was this black ninja squirrel we spotted!! We ended up seeing more in DC and Canada, but hello ninja squirrel!

Mango Trifle from the ground up

2011-12-16T15:27:00.000+10:00

One of our December holiday "traditions" is to make trifle. We don't do it every year, and sometimes we make trifle outside of December, which is why I've put "tradition" in bunny quotes. But, we've had trifle a few times at Christmas, and we like it a lot.

This year we had an idea (okay, we saw it on Better Homes & Gardens) to put mango into trifle. We've got mangoes up the wazoo, so I decided to create a tropical trifle for Christmas this year. And I had an opportunity to pre-test it when I was asked to bring dessert to dinner at a friend's house.

Only trouble is, it was in the mid-high-30s, Celsius - and humid - the week I was due to make the pre-test trifle. So I didn't want to put on the oven to make a cake for the bottom layer. And since vegan cakes aren't so easy to find in Townsville, I couldn't take the storebought cheater's way out. I contemplated, and considered, and was finally struck with inspiration - pancakes! They are basically just like cake, and don't involve the oven. Since I cut up the cake layer of the trifle into chunks anyways, why not use pancakes?

So here is how we constructed our tropical trifle, from the bottom layer right up to the top.

Ground floor. Make a batch of pancakes. This can be done ahead of time. I needed 8 pancakes which were about 5 or 6 inches in diameter. When you're ready to build the trifle, sandwich two pancakes together with jam (mango, obviously). Cut them into squares and put in the bottom of the trifle bowl (we use a deep-ish glass baking dish). Sprinkle with a weensy bit (or a lot) of cointreau, or use some other kind of booze.

First floor. Cut the cheeks off of two mangoes, and cut them into chunks. Put these on top of the pancakes. Give the trifle bowl a good shake to settle everything in together.

Second floor. Now, make some jelly. If you have an easy source of tropical-ish flavoured vegan jelly, lucky you! We don't. So I made some pineapple jelly using a tin of crushed pineapple and about 2 tablespoons of agar flakes. Soak the agar in just enough water to cover, and meanwhile boil the pineapple, juice & all, for 3 or 4 minutes. Tip in the agar and keep it boiling for another 5 or 10 minutes, until the agar fully dissolves. You can check whether the agar has worked by dipping a spoon into the pan and then sticking it in the fridge for a minute. It should set up obviously - if not, add more agar (I had to, I think because the acidity of the pineapple). Pour this over the mango, and again give it a good shake to let it settle into the cracks.

The tinned pineapple resulted in a layer of juice-jelly settling around the pancakes, and a layer of fruit-jelly sitting on top of the mango. I kinda dug it this way, but Andy's mum & grandma & aunties all set the jelly in a separate pan, break it up with a fork, and then put it on top of the fruit, so I will do it this way for the Christmas trifle.

Third floor. When the jelly has cooled a touch, add a sliced banana. Or whatever other tropical fruit you have and like.

Penthouse. Make custard. I used the recipe from Joy of Vegan Baking, with a few alterations. In a jug, mix 1/3 c. raw sugar, 2 T. plain flour, and 4 T. corn flour (corn starch). Open a 400ml can of coconut cream (sold as, I believe, coconut milk in the US - cream of coconut is something else involving sweet). Whisk about 1/4 c. of the coconut cream into the sugar until smooooooth. Heat up the rest of the tin of coconut cream, plus a smidge of water to rinse the can, over medium-low heat. When it's at a simmer, tip about 1/2 c. of the hot coconut milk into the jug, and whisk again until smooth, then tip all of that into the pan. Cook and whisk constantly until it's nice and thick, and then turn off the heat and whisk hard for 30 seconds. Then pour, gently (don't want to mess up those carefully placed bananas!) onto the top of the trifle. Smooth the top, cover with cling wrap, and chill.

Admire the layers. Add toasted coconut on top, if you can be bothered. Or don't. Consume.

Run Wild...

2011-12-15T15:46:00.000+10:00

For our last day in Ireland, we let ourselves be talked into going on a tour of County Wicklow, south of Dublin. The couple we stayed with in Dublin said it was a gorgeous area, and other guests they have had really loved the Wild Wicklow tour. It was a bit more spendy than we loved, but we figured it would be the best way to get out of Dublin and see a bit of Irish countryside in a more exciting way than just getting the train to a small town nearby and poking around a bit.

Andy and I had never been on an organised tour before this, but then again, we had never been on holidays overseas either - most of our travel is either within driving distance of Townsville or work-related. So our lack of going On Tour is partially based on snobbery and partially based on lack of opportunity.And while we didn't love the groupiness of the tour, and the constant chatter of being on a tour, we did really appreciate getting shown around and seeing things that, if we had taken a self-drive option, would likely have been completely outside of our radar. So my review of the tour itself is tempered with that appreciation, despite the four annoying Kentucky tourists who we couldn't seem to get away from.

The day started with a trip to the seaside part of Dublin. We stopped for a few minutes at DunLaoghaire Harbour - pronounced "Dun Leery" and apparently mispronounced by Hilary Swank in the film P.S. I love you, which I haven't seen.

We drove past gates that apparently protect the homes of Ireland's rich and famous - Bono and Enya, before being let off the bus for nearly an hour at a very expensive shop/cafe. I find shopping terribly boring and neither Andy nor I wanted coffee, so we amused ourselves in the garden, instead.

Back on the bus, we drove up into the mountain range and stopped to admire the peat, covered in remnants of heather, and the mountain lakes.

We drove a bit further on and had a whiskey overlooking Lough Tay, known colloquially as Guinness Lake - part of the estate of the Guinness family, the most recent resident of whom had sand shipped from California to make a beach, also transforming the brown peaty water lake into the spitting image of a pint of guinness.

We stopped for lunch at a "traditional Irish pub", which must cater to hundreds of tour-participants a day. I had some veggie soup, which was meh. It started raining while we ate. It was still raining when we got to Glendalough, which was a shame, because I would have liked to spend lots of time looking around.

The site has been a monastic settlement since about 600AD, and this round tower was built before the 12th Century.

According to our tour guide, who may not be an academically rigorous source of information, Ireland's round towers inspired the Brothers Grimm to write their story Rapunzel.

Also on the site are some old churchy ruins.

And a sprawling cemetery.

Our last stop was the Upper Lake at Glendalough.

The swans are friendly (hungry).

Andy touched the water, as he does.

And we walked up to a pretty waterfall.

And were blinded by how green everything is - so many shades of green.

The emerald isle indeed.

Dirty Dublin

2011-12-14T09:03:00.000+10:00

I can't believe I've been home for six weeks and am still posting about travel, and only up to the halfway point! Here's a post about our next destination: Dublin.

After some beautiful weather in Scotland, we were a bit dismayed to be rained on, heavily, for almost the whole time we were in Ireland. We were also dismayed at how expensive everything is. But, there was lots of pretty stuff, our accommodation was great, and we happened upon some exciting veg food finds.

On our first full day in Dublin, it was cloudy but not yet raining. So we did lots of wandering around (continuing to get lost, despite having maps, and having street signs in english, and whatnot). We poked our heads into Dublin Castle and found they were giving free tours, because one part of the castle was closed to visitors. So we said 'yes please!' and had a tour through the central courtyard, which was central to the Easter Rising in 1916.

We looked at the remaining tower, and went into the underground bit where we saw lots of archaeological evidence that showed the occupation of this site since Viking times.

We went into the chapel, which isn't used any more, but is still really gorgeous.

We checked out the really old Church of Audoen, which had gravestones for the floor - a slightly creepy idea, but kind of cool in terms of the history of the place, too.

There were other churches that cost money to get into, so we skipped them. And there was the Jameson Whiskey Museum, and the Guinness Factory, both of which were also too expensive. So we skipped them, looked around Trinity College and Temple Bar, drank pints in pubs, and went to some free museums. These were especially useful when the downpour started.

Trinity College, founded in 1592.

As a result, there aren't quite so many photos from Dublin. But the museums were cool - one about military history, with lots of attention paid to the fight for independence from Britain; one about archaeology, with bog men and medieval religious artefacts and gold; and one about 'natural history', which is referred to by locals as the 'dead zoo' because it is just a vast collection of taxidermied animals.

Food-wise, we did eat plenty of hummus and bread, and chips, and other thrifty meals. I forgot to take my camera out at Juice, where we had a two-course lunch for €8.95 each. I had nori maki for a starter, which was good but small. Andy started with pitta and crudites with olive tapenade, which was plentiful and delicious. We shared, of course. Then for our mains, I had the bean casserole of the day, which turned out to be green lentils, veggies, and a tomato-coconut curry sauce. With brown rice. Andy had corn fritters, which were not vegan and not big enough for him. Luckily this time my meal was big and heaping, so I shared. Go to Juice if you are in Dublin, it is good.

I did take photos at Cornucopia, which turned out to be a cafeteria-style place where you ordered one main and two salads, which were dished out onto your plate from a big pan. Andy found this deeply disappointing, and he talked for days about how much he didn't love it. I thought the food was good, and we got loads of it, so I was happy.

I ate some kind of tempeh stew on rice, with salads of garlic potatoes with roast hazelnuts in vegan mayonnaise, and broccoli couscous something or other.

Andy had an eggplant bake sort of thing, with a noodle salad and some other bean-y vegetable salad. One of the reasons I suspect he was unhappy with it is because he ordered wrong - I should have been generous and swapped plates, but those garlic potatoes were just so yummy.

Sweet Chilli Tofu

2011-12-11T12:42:00.001+10:00

A few weeks ago, Andy and I were perusing the shelves at our local grocery store when we happened upon an intense mark-down. Singapore sweet chili-marinated tofu steaks. Normally more expensive than we are willing to spend. Reduced to 20 flipping cents.

We couldn't resist, as we can't whenever we see something reduced to 20 cents, and we bought the whole lot.

Now we have a freezer full of tofu which is pretty tasty, and makes an easy addition to a meal. It just needs to be heated up quickly in a frying pan, and it goes wonderfully with veggies.

It's a good add-in to a stir fry.

And if you cook it on hot enough heat, it sort of caramelizes, making the perfect accompaniment to pan-fried potatoes and mushrooms.

Now, we just have 15 or so more to get through!

Around the world in... Statues

2011-12-09T12:18:00.000+10:00

We saw loads of statues on our trip round the globe. Here's a few of the ones that struck my fancy enough to take a photo. (Click to see bigger photos.)

Is it just me, or does this Boy Scout statue in Washington DC seem a little inappropriate? Small child, two scantily clad adults... One holding flames in her bare hand - ouch!

At the base of the Big Buddha, on Lantau Island, twelve Chinese warriors like this one had different hats on. This one's hat is a bunny rabbit.

Though technically not a statue, this eagle pulpit in a Dublin church was cool enough for Andy to specifically request a photo.

In NYC's financial district, there are mushrooms growing.

In Central Park, some eagles attack a goat. Anyone know what this one is about? I'm really stumped as to the symbolism...

Philadelphia, the city of statues, brought us this giant clothes peg...

A bit of love...

A lightning bolt, key, and kite in honour of old Ben Franklin...

A chunky guy in a suit...

Some board game pieces...

And... whatever this is.

In Scotland, we were a bit scandalised by this creation, outside the Kirk of the HolyRood (Church of the Holy Cross) in Edinburgh. Photos don't really do this justice: it is a goat, with horns draped over a man's naked ass, while the man cuddles a lion.

Whisky, Heylan' Coos, and Haggis

2011-12-07T10:52:00.000+10:00

Now we leap back in time once again as I continue to regale you with tales from our Round the World trip. When I last left you, Andy and I had climbed Alps, eaten chocolate, and seen a cow parade in Switzerland. After only 90 minutes in the air, we found ourselves in the UK. A night in Manchester, a train ride, and - tada! - we were in Edinburgh.

Now, the plan, when we originally conceptualised our trip, was to spend a few days in Edinburgh, before moving on to Aberdeen, where Andy had to present at a conference. Though the conference started Monday, we thought the chances of him being scheduled on the first day were slim. Well, would you believe that he was scheduled for the very first session on the very first day? As a result, we got a bit less than 24 hours in Edinburgh. But didn't we make the most of it!

Edinburgh was the most tourist-iest place we'd been. Red double-decker tour buses, wall to wall people, camera flashes everywhere you turned... (Not that I can complain too much, seeing how we both contributed to the mass of tourists.)

Because we had such a short visit, we didn't bother spending money to go into the things - our logic is that if you have to pay for it, you want to spend lots of time to make it value for money. And we didn't have lots of time. So we went to the gates of Edinburgh Castle and admired from outside.

We looked around a church. An old church. Where, like, lots of important people have sat. And lots of important weddings and funerals and stuff have been held.

Peeked at the Castle of the Holyrood - the Queen's official residence in Scotland.

And ate dinner at the fabulously amazing Henderson's Bistro. There was seriously not a thing on this menu that I wouldn't have happily devoured. We began the meal with a Hot Toddy, since it was bloody freezing. I couldn't say no to veggie haggis with neeps and tatties, since we were in Scotland for goodness sake! Andy had, I believe, the Nut Burger. For dessert, we each had cherry pie with soya cream. All food was delicious, and I wish we had more time in Edinburgh just to come back to this restaurant.

This isn't where we ate. This is the Scottish Parliament, and some impressive bluffs nearby.

In fact, Edinburgh was the home of good food for us - our two meals both turned out to be delicious. Breakfast on Monday morning was at our accommodation, the Claymore Vegetarian Guest House. This place was comfortable, adorable, and Cathy was very friendly. And, most importantly, breakfast was huge, and really good - quality food, and lots of it, is a winning combination.

This isn't where we stayed, but check out the blue door!

But sadly, we had to head off quickly to Aberdeen. Andy presented his paper. Then we wandered around the small city, looking at the gray, granite houses.

And the gray, granite buildings.

And the gray sky.

And William Wallace.

The food at our guest house in Aberdeen was not so good. They said 'sure we can do vegan breakfast!' when we made our booking, and then forgot about it. By the second morning they had bought soymilk, and the fruit salad was good. But basically, I ate a lot of tattie scones and baked beans.

This isn't where we stayed. This is the library.

Then, the best part of the trip: whisky. We hired a car, drove 2 hours into the heart of "Speyside", and paid a visit to a friend-of-a-friend at Glenfarclas, a family-run whisky distillery.

We toured the place, watching barley turn into what was essentially beer.

And then into the copper stills where it becomes whisky.

Then they dump it into wooden casks, and put it in the shed for a decade, or lots of decades. All the while, it soaks up some yummy burnt-oak flavours from the cask, and sooty-looking lichen grows on the outside of the buildings, feeding on the alcohol fumes and getting drunk.

We tasted some delicious whisky: a 10 year old, a 40 year old, and a 1961 cask strength. At about 60% alcohol, the last one needed watering down, but the 40 year old was like drinking butterscotch. We ate a giant baguette and a whole container of hummus between us afterwards, to soak up some booziness.

And then we drove down the road to Speyside Cooperage to watch some guys repair casks - not barrels, though, since they're a smaller size. These are, I think, 'hogs head' sized casks.

And we learnt lots of fun facts about barrels. Like, did you know they can only use American oak trees, because they grow the straightest with the least knots? And they only use second-hand barrels for scotch whisky - the flavours from the sherry or bourbon goes into the flavours of the whisky and gives it a certain somethin' somethin'. And, casks are deceptively difficult to make, but Andy and I conquered the display model anyways.

We had a quick look at Bonlivet Castle.

But I was distracted by the furry cows.

I fed this one some good grass from our side of the fence, and was rewarded with a sloppy lick.

And that was the end of our surprisingly short visit to Scotland. Definitely a place I'd like to go back to!

Mango Pancakes

2011-12-03T07:09:00.001+10:00

What to eat for breakfast when you have no soy milk, no bread, and a pile of mangoes? While you could just eat, well, mangoes, our extreme glut led to a bit more creativity in terms of how we consume them. Thus, the idea for mango pancakes was born. These are fluffy and orange, and perfect topped with more mango.

I will post the recipe as I made it, but note that I didn't add any sugar - I thought the mangoes would be sweet enough. And if we had used Bowen mangoes, they probably would have been. Instead, we used the variety royal red mango, which is less sweet. So next time I make these I will add just a touch of sugar - maybe a tablespoon - to the batter, to enhance the flavour of the mango a bit. Use your judgement, and your taste preferences.

Also, if you don't have fresh (or frozen) mango on hand to blend up, I suspect mango juice will work perfectly - you just may need to reduce the amount of water that goes into the batter, because the juice won't be as thick as the puree. If you're feeling decadent and have fresh coconut juice around, I think that would make a fantastic substitution for the plain water.

Mango Pancakes
serves 2 hungry adults

1 1/2 c. plain flour
2 tsp. baking powder
1/2 tsp. salt
1 1/2 c. pureed mango
3/4 to 1 c. water
2 Tbsp. rice bran oil (or other plain-tasting veg. oil)

In a large bowl, stir together the flour, baking powder and salt. In a separate jug, stir mango, 3/4 c. water and oil together. Add the mango mixture to the flour and stir until just mixed. If the batter is too thick, add additional water as needed. It should be pretty thick - these are fluffy pancakes - but it should be viscous enough to pour, just.

Let the batter rest for about 10 minutes. Meanwhile, heat up your pan - preferably cast iron or non-stick. Lightly brush it with a coating of oil. When it's good and hot, pour a small spoonful of batter into the pan. The first pancake never works well for me, so I get around this by making it a really tiny one. While you're eating the test-pancake, pour a larger amount of batter into the pan and spread it slightly into a circle. I use a serving spoon for this, as I find it gives me the right amount of batter for easily-flippable pancakes.

The pancakes are ready to flip when the edges look dry and you can see bubbles in the surface. If you're not sure, peek under the edge. Flip, and watch the pancakes puff up and go super-fluffy. When the other side is brown, transfer to a plate and keep warm in the oven while you finish the rest of the batch.

Serve warm, with more mango, or with a tropical-ish jam, or with some kind of syrup.

Mango Madness

2011-11-26T16:15:00.000+10:00

I'm going to pause my travel stories for a moment, and fast forward to the present. As America picks over Thanksgiving leftovers and gears up for Christmas, I'm loving summer here in Australia, because summer = mango season. Andy and I are mango-obsessed, so I was not terribly unhappy to leave the US in the end of October, saying goodbye to this:

Especially because it meant coming home to this:

And this, which I think is prettier than any Christmas tree.

Within two weeks of coming home, we have welcomed about 100 mangoes into our home. Not all at once - the most we had at any given moment was 59, but we've been eating them and adding more.

You might think this is overkill, but last year's mango season had so much promise, and was then cruelly cut short by the stupid wet season. So we couldn't resist, on the bike path one afternoon, the mangoes that looked to be within reach that were just starting to blush. We pulled over, and found that they were higher than they looked, and even Andy's extreme 6'6 reach couldn't grab them. Did we let that defeat us? Hell no - Andy boosted me up, and somehow we managed to come home with a backpack-full of big, Bowen mangoes.

Later in the week, we went out with Dee and BoaB and their amazing telescopic pruner.

Then we went to the uni and scoured the trees there.

And the next weekend we bought two buckets at the markets. I did mention we were a bit obsessive, right?

We've been eating a few fresh mangoes every day. Usually straight up, but also with ice cream, crumpets, or tapioca pudding. Or, this morning, in pancakes (recipe here).

In smoothies.

In green mango salad (made with fresh tumeric, chilli, and lime juice from Dee and BoaB's garden - delicious!).

And in spicy mango salsa, on burritos.

Our goal, in addition to eating as many fresh, delicious mangoes as possible, is to preserve them in lots of different ways, so we can enjoy mango-deliciousness all year round. I wish we had a preserving kit, or even the gear that let us jar stuff in a sterile and long-lasting way. I also wish we had a giant freezer. But we don't. We do, however, have a dehydrator, a bread maker, and an ice cream maker. So we put them to use.

We've had a few batches of dried mango slices.

And fruit leather.

And we've made some mango-ginger-lime sorbet, which admittedly won't last us all year long, or even all month long, but it is delicious.

And we put the breadmaker to use on a few batches of mango jam.

We've got four methods of getting into mangoes in our repertoire. First, for mangoes that are on the underripe side, and which you want to cut up the whole thing, including the fruit around the seed - peeling the skin works best.

Just be careful not to peel yourself. It hurts.

For mangoes that are quite ripe, and which you want to cut up the whole thing, including the fruit around the seed - score a shallow X in each cheek of the mango, then peel the skin off with your hands. If you want just the cheeks of the mango, and aren't so fussed about the seed (for example, to serve at a dinner party with tapioca pudding...) you can just cut the cheeks off and scoop out the fruit with a spoon. If you just want to eat the mango, and not bother with cutting, our favourite is to cut off the cheeks, score, and then pop out. We refer to it as 'porcupined', but it doesn't look that much like a porcupine I guess.

Barring any unforeseen, mango-wrecking rains, we should be living this lifestyle for another few weeks at least. It's the most wonderful time of the year!

Up an Alp in Appenzell

2011-11-25T07:53:00.001+10:00

I'm going to use our day trip to Appenzell canton to make some generalisations about Switzerland, but please take them with a grain of salt - my conclusions are based on 3 full days and 2 half days, plus conversation with Andy's sister-in-law, who has lived there for nearly 2 years now. I'm using Appenzell as my example because it epitomises so much of what is Swiss about Switzerland, so even though the cities are not so much like this anymore, there are undercurrents of the traditionalism and conservatism demonstrated by Appenzell throughout the Swiss culture. But also bear in mind that most Swiss make fun of Appenzell for being so backward (hello, giving women the right to vote in 1991).

First of all, Switzerland is an active country. We took the adorable, red Appenzellerbahn, a small train with a whistle that sounded just like a toy train, to the base of Ebenalp.

This is a supposedly small mountain, at a mere 1640m tall. There were two ways up - cable car, and walking.

And three ways down - cable car, walking, and paragliding.

We - three young, reasonably fit people - took the cable car up, and then walked partway down to have a look at the caves, with evidence of prehistoric human inhabitants.

The wildkirchli, or Wild Church, where hermits used to worship.

And the mountain restaurant. When we got here, it was full of people - who had walked up. People in their 60s & 70s. We were easily the youngest people on the mountain, and we were surrounded by people who had hiked all the way up. Impressive.

Especially when, on the walk back up to where we had started, which was uphill but not steep, and maybe about 50m walk, we were so puffed we had to stop and take a break. As 60 year olds passed us without even working up a sweat. As we sat on the bench, appreciating the scenery, a cloud rolled in.

We decided to wait it out in a truly Swiss way - in the cafe on top of the mountain. Yes - there were two cafes on this mountain. Andy's sister-in-law translated the menu for us, pointing out in particular the "light choice", which was a salad served with a huge, greasy schnitzel on top. This allows me to make another generalisation about Switzerland - they eat crappy food. Their meals are rich, full of sausage, cheese, and cream. As a result, it is not a terribly vegan-friendly country*. The Swiss have the highest per capita consumption of both cheese and chocolate, but because of how active everyone is, climbing up mountains and that, they have generally low levels of heart disease, and they age really gracefully.

The cloud didn't let up, so we took the cable car back down, and returned to the town of Appenzell.

This place seemed to thrive on tourism, mainly from other parts of Switzerland, so it was full of stereotypes - cowbells, Swiss army knives, and cheese.

Oh, the cheese was just horrible. Appenzeller cheese is renowned for its strong, tangy smell, which pervaded the whole town of Appenzell. We went into a shop selling cheese, and were browsing in a different section, looking at all the flavours of schnapps, and it was such a strong smell that you just never get used to it.

We were just deciding whether we should stick around Appenzell or head back to St Gallen when we were surprised with an Appenzell tradition. Every autumn, when the farmers gather their cows from the surrounding mountainside, they celebrate with a cow parade through town. The cows were preceded by a deafening roar, the source of which we were unsure. Then we saw these poor cows with giant bells around their necks, and flowers on their heads.

Which leads me to another generalisation - the Swiss love cows. Although, as a vegan, I am opposed to the concept of using animals for human gain, from a welfarist point of view, cows are generally well treated in Switzerland (except when they have to wear bells bigger than their heads and parade through town...).

We finished our day with a trip through a Swiss supermarket, Migros, where we picked up some epic Swiss junk food - Paprika flavoured potato chips, and - get this - peanut butter flips. As in, like, cheese puffs, but peanut butter flavoured. Best Ever Junk Food. And all vegan.

So in a nutshell - Switzerland is conservative, in a traditional sort of way. They love cows, cheese, and chocolate, but they're constantly moving so we saw loads of healthy-looking people everywhere we went. And, mainly, it is a country full of adorable, beautiful, quaint scenery. So be prepared to go "Awww!" a lot if you ever visit.

*Though, I will admit that the following day in Zurich we ate a beautiful meal at the pay-by-weight buffet Hiltl, Europe's oldest veg restaurant, which was good but So Expensive. And in St Gallen's market, we picked up some vegan croissants, made with sunflower oil.

Around the world in... Things that made me giggle.

2011-11-23T17:21:00.001+10:00

I'm taking a break in the chronological description of our trip to show you some glimpses, if you will, from all of our stops. This post will perhaps give you a glimpse into me and my own weird sense of humour, because these are photos I took of things that made me go "heh".

In the small town of Hammondsport, in Western NY, this sign was on the side of a building. First it made me go, 'huh?'. Then it made me go, 'heh'.

This is maybe what happens to people who eat too much Burger King - they turn into a monster. In Niagara Falls, Canada.

In Lake George, in upstate NY, the souvenir shops gave Andy a good posing opportunity.

Lego Atlas, at the Rockefeller Plaza Lego Store in NYC.

Maybe it's not funny, but I was amused by what I assume to be this overly dramatised 'deep water' sign in Glendalough, Ireland.

At a Very Old Church in Dublin, St Audoen's Church, these skulls watch over the congregation every Sunday.

In Schaffhausen, Switzerland, we were reminded just how tall Andy is, especially compared to Ye Olden Times.

We lul-ed over this sign in St Gallen, Switzerland. No dragging children on leashes, no warming your hands over fires, and definitely no dance parties.

I didn't think it was real when I saw this sign in Hong Kong for the "Dirty Sanchez Burger". This was in the expat neighbourhood, and we saw the sign from the escalators.

A vending machine full of cold corn soup, AU$1.20 each, at the Central Pier in Hong Kong.

A tee shirt for sale in Hong Kong - "You Gut I Gut". I have no idea.

A shop called Wanko, in Hong Kong.

A Guten Tag on the Rhine

2011-11-19T17:28:00.001+10:00

While in Switzerland, we were hoping to do a bit of travelling around - it's a small country, and you can basically get across it by train in a few hours. But, as I mentioned earlier, Switzerland is very expensive, and although the distances are short, they are costly. And, as we were in a restful phase of our trip, we didn't really want to spend half the day on the train (since we certainly couldn't afford staying overnight at whatever far-flung destination we wanted to visit!). So we looked through the guidebooks at Andy's brother's house, and talked to his sister-in-law, and decided we would head towards Rheinfell and then make our way back to St Gallen along the Rhine and the Bodensee (Lake Konstanz).

View Larger Map

We packed a bag with some leftover capsicum-loaded spaghetti, some apples, and a bottle of water, layered on as many clothes as we could comfortably move around in, and headed for the Bahnhoffstrasse - the train station.

We caught the comfy commuter train to Winterthur, and then changed to a smaller local train where we got off at our first stop, Rheinfell. We had read about this in the Lonely Planet, which declared it not as impressive as Niagara by any standards, but Europe's biggest waterfall no less. So we didn't have high hopes, though did think the castle on each side of the waterfall sounded like a nice touch. We were pleasantly surprised with the waterfal, which was beautiful and impressive.

The castle on the far side of the river, Schloss Worth, looked more like a large house to us, so we didn't pay for the several Swiss Franc ferry ride over to see it.

Schloss Worth, though, was free to get into and was more imposing.

And it offered good views of the falls.

After admiring from several angles, we decided to continue on our journey. Nachster Halt: Schaffhausen. This was a very likeable town with an old, cobblestone centre which felt very German (having never, at that point, been to Germany). Apparently this was the only Swiss town to be bombed in WWII, because the Allies mistook it for Germany. We had lunch in the square, eating leftover pasta and a fresh bretzel alongside locals eating sausage and bread (held in separate hands, one bite of sausage followed by one bit of bread).

We checked out a church built in ~1100, which was imposing inside, and clearly built in the 'frighten the bejeesus out of people to encourage religiousity' school of church architecture.

Even the entrance was, quite frankly, intimidating.

But it had a cool herb garden outside, tended since the Middle Ages.

And we walked up the hill to the Munot, a weird fortress/castle/round building from the 16th century.

It was all but empty inside, which makes me reluctant to use the term 'castle'. This made Andy speculate that, when under threat, this was the place everyone ran to, and hid. I suspect there were strict selection criteria for entry, but maybe there's a chance it was egalitarian...

But it would be a good vantage point, with views like this.

We continued on our train trip, travelling along the Rhine through fields of veggies and apples. We left the train once again in Stein am Rhein, the town declared by Lonely Planet to be the Best in All Switzerland. (Their terminology may have been different, but that was the gist.) Andy's sister-in-law told us it wasn't that great, so we weren't sure what to expect. On our way from the train station, we got a close up view of something that we saw from a lot of trains - rent-a-gardens. It seems that, in the bits of land near train stations that are too small for living but too big to waste, the rail company has hired out plots of land to people who want to grow stuff.

We also saw walnuts growing. Tell me they don't look like what I think they look like.

The town is loomed over by this castle on the hill.

When we found the town (our ability to get lost and walk the wrong way didn't get left behind in Hong Kong, that's for sure), what we found was quaint and medieval.

And very clearly tourist-oriented.

But with a sense of whimsy, or perhaps just a sincere love of dogs.

We visited a chocolate shop and got a dairy-free block of dark chocolate with almonds. We (okay, I) ate half the block sitting near that dog statue.

Andy touched the Rhine, or rather, the place where the Rhine meets Lake Constance/ Lake Konstanz/ the Bodensee (with so many languages, things tend to have several names in Switzerland).

We hopped back on the train, got off in Kreutzlingen, and then took a quick, minute long train ride across the border into the German city of Konstanz. Konstanz's strategy, during WWII, was to ignore black outs and leave the lights on, in the hopes that the Allies would think they were Switzerland. It worked, and they were never bombed.

It felt like a nice city, but the places we had been earlier in the day were so Bavarian in nature that it didn't feel like a different country. Until we saw a busker playing accordion. Then it felt pretty German.
Compared to the highly reserved nature of the Swiss, something about an accordion just strikes me as bawdy and fun-loving.

We looked at the lake.

Looked at this rotating statue, living at the end of a pier, with loads of cleavage and a bit of va-jim-jam hanging out.

And then, after only about 6 hours of doing stuff, we went home, tired and happy (and with happy feet), glad to have embraced a slower pace of travel.

Windows to the soul

2011-11-17T08:30:00.000+10:00

One of my favourite things about Switzerland was all of the adorable window decor, so here is a post dedicated to the shutters and oriels and frescos that we saw.

In the town of Appenzell...

In the castle known as Schloss Laufen, in Rheinfell...

In the really charming town of Schaffhausen...

Yeah, that's a skeleton wearing a pirate hat inside this oriel.

In Stein am Rhein, where Andy wondered how people go about their everyday business when their town feels like such a fairy tale...

My favourite house in all of St Gallen, based on our very brief tour of the place, and primarily due to the Bright Red Shutters!

I've honestly never given a second thought to shutters before visiting Switzerland, but now they are on every imagining of a dream home that pops into my head.

Neutral, and On Time

2011-11-16T09:52:00.001+10:00

After 5 days in hectic Hong Kong, our brief respite in Switzerland was much needed and quite welcomed. In contrast to Hong Kong's crowded, busy efficiency, Switzerland had a slower pace, and a polite but unfriendly efficiency. It was clean, it was quiet, and it was so damn picturesque. Andy and I, hilarious individuals that we are, made plenty of jokes about neutrality and timeliness.

Getting to Switzerland was one of the least fun plane rides we had on the whole trip. We left at 11pm or so, after a full day of touristing at the Big Buddha, and with no shower. Before boarding the plane, I was already feeling fairly ill, probably from eating cold spring rolls. And the plane was crowded. Poor Andy's legs, from hip to knee, is precisely the distance from his seat back to the one in front of him, and he found himself in a plane seat with one of those stupid boxes in the foot space. The food was only okay, and the movie selection was disappointing. Swiss Air definitely didn't win us over in the 13 hours during which we were a captive audience.

Arriving in Zurich at 6am, we had a few hours to kill before we met up with Andy's sister-in-law to get keys and directions to her apartment. So we got train tickets and went into Zurich city for a look around. Our first impression of Zurich was that it was nearly empty (it was still very early, though), very cold, and very expensive - before lunch, on the first day, we spent about AU$100. Yikes! But it was also very pretty. There is a river running through the city.

With old churches on either side.

And lots of pretty swans.

But it lacked a vibrancy, and we weren't immediately taken with Zurich (though, after visiting on a Saturday at lunch time, I realise this is probably because of our timing). We did poke through a local market, with loads of exciting produce - mushrooms, artichokes, berries, apples, pears, potatoes... But we were pretty happy to meet up with Andy's sister-in-law at lunch time and head back to her place in St Gallen for long showers, laundry, and resting.

And, although we did plenty of stuff while we were in Switzerland, my lasting impression is the restfulness. We cooked at Andy's brother's apartment most nights, which was a nice break after restaurant-eating for so many days in a row in Hong Kong. We dawdled through parks and grocery stores, and old towns, and churches. We spent lots of time in markets (which are set up 4 or 5 days a week in St Gallen, I think).

St Gallen, although a smaller city, was more appealing to us than Zurich. It has a giant, old cathedral.

And a funny story about how the site was chosen. So the legend goes, as we heard it, a drunken Irish priest called Gallus was tramping through Switzerland when he fell. A bear came to his aid, and Gallus took this as a sign from God - so decided to build a church on the site.

St Gallen's old city has heaps of cool old oriel windows.

There was also So Much Fruit around the town, growing in people's yards, in parks, along the sidewalks...

And we stumbled upon a little community compost pit, which was adorable and awesome.

We caught a tiny tram up a hill, and had a look around some manmade lakes.

But the best part about being on the hill was the views over the little city.

Soon, I'll tell you about the day trip we took along the Rhine, and the other day trip we took up an Alp. But for now, here's one last photo of Switzerland's quaintness.

One last Hong Kong post

2011-11-13T18:02:00.000+10:00

I think it is worth telling you all about our second day in Hong Kong in regular, chronological narrative form. It kind of demonstrates the kind of experience we had in a way that showing you a bunch of photos at once doesn't do.

We started by walking over to Whampoa, and catching the ferry to North Point.

We walked around that neighbourhood for a few minutes, just taking it all in, before catching the train to Causeway Bay to visit the library.

Because, you see, my iPod wasn't the most convenient in Hong Kong. Our hotel had free internet. That's internet, not wifi. Doh. But there was plenty of free wireless around Hong Kong - public parks, for example, all offered free government wifi. But the other thing we didn't bring was an adaptor, so I could only charge my iPod through a USB. So to the library we went, to charge iPods, email parents, and check up on students.

We got a teensy bit lost finding the train station to head further in towards Central. But, when we got off the train, we had no trouble finding Hong Kong Park. We saw a vegetarian tea house, and I got a little excited, but it wasn't yet open. Instead, we went straight to our intended destination - the Flagstaff Teaware Museum. This is an old colonial building that now houses exhibitions dedicated to all things tea.

When we finished looking at interesting tea pots (and I began longing for an elephant-shaped tea pot for our kitchen), we went back to the tea house. But, it was booked out - and a good thing, because I think we would have been underdressed. It looked like a popular destination for Ladies Who Lunch. Instead, we ordered a turnip cake and fried mushroom dumplings and ate them next to a pond in the park.

We caught the Peak Tram up Victoria Peak, the big mountain that Hong Kong city crowds around. The tram was steep and messed with our perceptions of the buildings.

At the top, we walked around a little, but were a bit overwhelmed. At this point we were hot, and tired, and had been deposited by the tram into a massive shopping mall (as we came to realise is the case at basically every train stop).

The view was stunning, but our legs and feet were tired so we kind of didn't appreciate it as much as we should have.

But we did pose for some self-timer photos.

We got the tram back down the hill.

And then tried to locate a few of the veggie restaurants I had identified using my fail-proof google maps strategy. The strategy was this -- I printed off a google map of each section of the city we were likely to visit. On these maps were marked all the vegetarian restaurants (that are listed on google, I guess) in that neighbourhood, with the little marker on the map, and the list with the name of the restaurant and the address. This seemed to me like a good idea before we left. But in practice, the maps weren't zoomed in far enough to navigate very successfully. And the addresses on the list were often written in Chinese characters. Der. So my failproof method resulted in lots of walking around, completely clueless as to where we needed to be. So on this day, it was probably 1 or 1.30 when we started looking for lunch. We were heading to the nearest restaurant on the little google map first. But we got to the end of that street and hadn't passed it. So we headed towards The Centre, an impressive building which, according to our google map, had a veggie place really close by.

At this point, it was probably 2.00 or so, and we were tired and hungry. We weren't even taking in the sights as we walked around, because we were cranky and a bit miserable. We retraced our steps, we scrutinised the maps, we figured out that it had to be down this little alley-way... but when we got there, we saw only one tiny hole-in-the-wall with no English language anywhere. It may have been the one, but we weren't brave enough to try it out. But, we had been walking for at least an hour, probably closer to two. So we were tiiiiired. So when we saw a sign for foot massage upstairs, and made a beeline straight for it. Let me tell you, that was the best decision we made on the whole trip. An hour of watching Shanghai Knights and drinking cold water in an air conditioned room while people rubbed our tired, sore legs and feet was exactly what we needed. Even though it delayed our meal even further, comfort beat out hunger on that afternoon.

Feeling a bit refreshed, we realised we were close enough to a third restaurant to try and locate it. At this point we were all the way up in Sheung Wan, which is a fair walk (or maybe it's not and my memory is deceiving me!). We located the corner it had to be near, and we walked back and forth a few times and then... Andy spotted a green "Vegetarian Food" sign! Success! I have never been so relieved to sit down and have a menu placed in front of me. The restaurant we had found was Po Lin Yuen Restaurant in Shueng Wan. It was 4pm, and there was almost no one else there, so service was prompt. It wasn't gourmet, or particularly healthy, but like the foot massage, it was exactly what we needed.

We had salt and pepper tofu, deep fried with a silky-smooth inside.

We got some sweet and sour veggie pork, which was crunchy mock meat nuggets coated in a sticky, sweet sauce, with yummy fresh pineapple chunks.

And we healthified it slightly with Buddha's Delight, a dizzying array of mushrooms with veggies and crunchy noodles.

After that, we realised how close we were to the Macau ferry terminal, and walked along the harbourside back to Central Pier, where we watched the sun set.

Then we caught the ferry back to Tsim Sha Tsui to watch the light show, which was less impressive than the number of people who gathered to see it.

We didn't get back to our hotel until after 9pm, and we were stuffed. It was a big day, with lots of walking, sweating, getting lost, being hungry, and grouching at each other. Luckily the rest of our days weren't like this, otherwise my overall opinion of Hong Kong would be very different!

This is the last of my Hong Kong-specific posts, up next is Switzerland...

Hong Kong: The things we ate

2011-11-11T16:28:00.000+10:00

Eating was good in Hong Kong. We had a tendency to eat a big, late lunch every day, and to supplement that main meal with breakfast in our hotel room and a snack-sized dinner.

For breakfasts, we had lots of gorgeous ripe dragon fruits.

Bananas, which was a nice change after coming from Australia where they were, at that point, still $12 a kilo.

And we ate a lot of bread and (no frills) peanut butter.

And all of this was made possible thanks to the awesome spoons we bought.

Lunches were nothing short of amazing. On our first day, we (eventually) managed to find M Garden, in Mongkok, which had a huge menu. We were pretty hungry, so we ordered lots.

Smoked goose rolls, which were veggies rolled up in yuba skin.

Vegan sashimi - Andy thought this might be interesting, and it was, but not in a way that either of us would order again. It was basically a salty agar jelly, which tasted ever so slightly of the sea.

Salt and pepper vegan pork, crunchy and greasy and salty and oh my.

And BBQ 'suckling pig' with steamed buns. Yeah, it's totally weird to think about eating suckling pig, even if it doesn't contain any animal products. But, I'm a sucker for steamed buns, and Andy is a sucker for BBQ. So we ordered this, and I'm glad we did. It was really delicious, with crunchy mock meat, tangy five spice BBQ sauce, and fluffy buns.

We also visited Kung Tak Lam in One Peking Tower, a fancier-feeling place in Kowloon with beautiful views over the Harbour towards Hong Kong Island as we ate. I didn't take any photos at this meal (because I forgot, I think). But, we had two main meals and some yum cha. The mains were Veggie Chicken with cashews & spicy sauce, and Mushrooms on a sizzling plate. This was very impressive - they poured the sauce over the mushrooms at the table, so it was all sizzly and the sauce got sticky. We also ordered spring rolls, vegetarian steamed buns, and a silverthread bun, which was kind of sweet. All of this costed us AU$31. So, whoo!

Another lunch was at the Chi Lin Vegetarian Tea House, within the grounds of the Nan Lian Garden. I didn't take photos there, because there was a sign saying 'no photos'. Boo. We ordered the five dish set menu, and I'm not sure we got everything we paid for, but we were full at the end of the meal. There was battered & deep fried eggplant (which proved difficult for two novice chop stickers to pick up), enoki mushrooms with greens, bean curd in spicy sauce, yuba wraps filled with Chinese amaranth, and shredded potatoes with seasonal veggies. The meal was really good, but in a very different way to most of the food we ate. It felt healthy, and was more about natural flavours rather than sticky sauces.

Our final big meal in Hong Kong was at the Po Lin Monastery, at the base of the Big Buddha. There were two set menu options - we opted for the Deluxe, for HK$120, or AU$15. As an added bonus, if you pre-buy a meal ticket you get to go up to the highest pedestal and get views like this:

That meal started with a very interesting soup, which had shreds of mushrooms and yuba, and instead of being brothy was kind of gooey. This makes it sound not good, but it was amazing. I willfully ignored the 'no photos' sign and snapped the soup, but Andy guilted me into putting my camera away after the first course.

The rest of the meal was braised lettuce with shiitake mushrooms; mixed veggies with cashews; spring rolls; and lemon bean curd, which was food from the gods. The lemon sauce was so sweet, tart, and morish. I really couldn't get enough. All up, this may have been the best meal we had, except that we were so close to the air conditioner which was on full blast, so the food all went cold before we got to taste it all.

Our dinners were much less exciting. We found some vegan kimchi flavoured instant noodles, which we cooked in the hotel microwave.

We frequented a street stall selling yummy fried tofu.

And on the last night, we made an exciting discovery. About 10 metres from our hotel was a small, hole-in-the-wall vegetarian restaurant. If only we had found it earlier. We went for dinner before our flight, but we were still a bit full from our massive meal at the Big Buddha. So instead of ordering from the menu, we picked some tasty-looking morsels from the window at the front. Andy ordered, while I sat with our stuff and felt tired - hot chose spring rolls, BBQ pork steam buns, spinach dumplings, and a plate with tofu, eggplant and capsicum. We assumed that the food from the window would be freshened up, or cooked somehow, and this was the case for the dumplings and the buns which had to be steamed. And the tofu & veggie plate was heated in the microwave... but the spring rolls came out cold. And they weren't very good. After starting to eat, Andy felt hungry for a proper-sized dinner, so he ordered a second round: steamed spinach bunns, broccoli dumplings, and a plate with four kinds of veggie meat made of yuba and gluten with different flavours. And, for dessert, some sweet steamed buns. This was so much food, and we were way too full. And I ended up feeling sick for the whole 13 hour flight out of Hong Kong, which I put down to the spring rolls.

Aside from that veggie place next door, the other great find of our trip was mochi. I know this isn't a new thing to a lot of people, but neither Andy nor I had tried it before. But we fell in love. We started with peanut, and liked it so much that we bought sesame and red bean as well, and then fresh mochi whenever we found it on the street. So. good.

I don't think I've ever eaten so well (and so cheaply!) as I had in Hong Kong...

Hong Kong: Temples and Gardens

2011-11-09T17:23:00.000+10:00

There are lots of things to say about Hong Kong. Like, all the free wifi all over the city. Lots of public parks had free wireless access, but since we didn't have a converter for my iPod charger I couldn't make very much use of it. But it's nice that it's there! And shopping! Hong Kong has more shopping than anyone could want, from the cheap stuff at markets to the high end shopping centres. In fact, pretty much every train station is also a shopping mall. We were more keen on the markets, though we were a little surprised to find a sex toy section in the Temple Street Night Markets. But we didn't buy much, sex toys or other souvenirs, because we were at the start of our trip and were smugly travelling lightly, with nothing but backpacks.

From sex toys to religion... I don't have a transition for this, because (as you can see) Hong Kong is a giant mix-up of everything you could want to do, see, experience, and as a result my stories about it are also a mix-up.

Hong Kong had loads of temples, and the thing I found interesting was that while they were centred on one of the three main religions (Buddhism, Confucianism, and Taoism), most had space for all three religions within their walls.

Tin Hau temple in Kowloon - the reason the photo looks hazy is because of all the incense smoke.

Temple of 10,000 Buddhas. This place... we had read really good things about it on the internet before we left Australia. The directions to get there seemed pretty straight forward. We got the train, and got off at the right station, and looked for signs, but managed, somehow, to go out the wrong exit. We found ourselves walking around Sha Tin, which is in Hong Kong's New Territories, for about an hour. The New Territories is the mainland China part of Hong Kong, and it felt very Chinese -- in contrast to most of the city, which just felt like a city. It was an interesting walk, but when we eventually found where we needed to go, it turned out to be about 3 minutes from the train station. Der.

And, in the end, the temple didn't really live up to the hype. Most of the temple was storage for cremated remains, so it felt a bit funny to be touristing while people were visiting dead relatives. But the Buddhas were pretty.

Outside the temple were these friendly cats.

Nan Lian Garden, outside the Chi Lin Nunnery. This was a gorgeous gem in the city - a traditional Tang Dynasty garden that was all about meditation and contemplation. There were rules forbidding "frolicking" and posing for photos in "costumes" like graduation gowns or wedding dresses.

Behind that waterfall was the Chi Lin Vegetarian Tea House, where we ate lunch. It was really lovely looking out the window and seeing water falling over the glass.

The view from the steps of the Chi Lin Nunnery over its internal gardens, with the city-scape in the background.

At the Man Mo Temple, in SoHo, these massive coils of incense provided a smoky atmosphere but left tourists at risk of ashy heads.

Hong Kong doesn't seem to discriminate, though - we also found this mosque.

And this Christian Church. We just happened to pass on a Sunday, so we stopped to watch the complex car parking situation that was going on. Most cars got to the bottom of the hill, at the red and white road block that you can just see in the bottom centre of the photo, and were diverted into a parking garage. But the flash, very expensive cars, were allowed up the hill, where they attempted 37-point turns (give or take) to squeeze into a very crowded parking lot. All so they didn't have to walk up the hill before church.

On our last day we went to Lantau Island and spent a few hours marvelling at the Big Buddha. This 34m tall bronze Buddha was a popular tourist destination, for good reason.

Just as interesting as walking up to the statue was poking through the Po Lin Monastery at the base of the giant Buddha.

Waiting for the bus to go back down the hill, we made friends with this Temple Cow.

These temples were much needed pockets of serenity in the midst of a crazy-big city, so we spent lots of time in them. Not to mention that almost all had veggie restaurants attached to them...

Walk On, Hong Kong

2011-11-07T20:17:00.001+10:00

Towards the end of our trip, and since we've returned, people have asked which stop was our favourite, and the answer is the same for both Andy and I: Hong Kong. It was interesting, cheap, and easy to get around. The public transport system made sense. The food was good (so good, in fact, that I will feature it in a post or two of its own). The people were friendly enough, with people approaching us to ask if we needed help on the more than regular occasions that we looked lost. The city was beautiful, the harbour was a great feature, and everything was cheap!

Only, when I think back to the specifics, it was crowded, and hot, and we got lost many times each day. As great as the public transit system is, it took us a while to fully sort it out. That, and we were touristing, so we wanted to see as much as we could. So we walked. A lot. More than was probably smart to do. We did see a lot, but we had tired, sore legs.

We first got lost the moment we got off the bus from the airport. We knew our hotel was only a minute or two from the stop, but we didn't know in which direction. So we walked, at about 9pm, through what we later discovered is Hong Kong's funeral district. When we found our hotel, the Bridal Tea House Wuhu Street, we were a little trepidatious. After the 8 hour flight, and a half hour of walking around, we were hoping for some comfort, but all the guidebooks and internet reviews kept our hopes for any Hong Kong accommodation low. But, we found that our room was clean, comfortable, and absolutely what we needed. The shower was good, the bed was too short for Andy but at least had space for his feet to hang over the edge. And the air conditioning proved a life saver, even for two Townsvillains who smugly refuse to use aircon at home.

We did loads of things in Hong Kong. I'll start with Kowloon, the second-citiest part of the city, across the harbour from Hong Kong Island. This is where our accommodation was, and where loads of backpacker rooms can be found. It's also home to the Gold Fish markets, a strip of two blocks or so of non-stop pet shops. Most were centred around fish tanks, and they tended to specialise - in aquarium equipment, or plants, or, most strikingly, fish. The freshwater fish were often pre-bagged, ready for quick sale.

The tiny turtles (and also tortoises) clambered over one another in tanks open on the street.

And the marine fish were abundant, and cheap - clownfish selling for the equivalent of AU$4.

Something we learned the hard way: the Gold Fish markets (and the Jade Markets, for that matter) don't start early. On our first morning, we woke up early due to time zone changes. Andy seemed to remember that these markets were best early in the day, so off we trekked (taking goodness knows how many wrong turns on the way). But they were totally empty. When we came back at 3pm, it was a totally different scene. In fact, we learned that Hong Kong in general sleeps in quite late. Most shops open at 10, 11 or 12, but they stay open until midnight.

As a vegan and a crowd-hater, though, I was much more comfortable in the little produce market we found (oddly, flanked by gun shops).

We also made a habit, throughout our trip, of visiting grocery stores in every place. This was for practicality (buying food) as much as for sight-seeing.

We weren't brave enough to try the wolfberry & white fungus flavoured instant oatmeal.

But we were taken with the "No Frills Brand" peanut butter - we ate this whole jar in 4 days.

Mainly, though, it was about the skyline, especially from Tsim Sha Tsui.

And sitting at Central Pier on Hong Kong Island at sunset was pretty stunning, too.

Now, I have plenty more to share, but I will save the rest for another post.

Circumnavigated

2011-11-05T06:40:00.002+10:00

This week saw the end of our round the world travels. I meant to blog while we were going about our food, the sights we saw, and all of that - oops! Turns out I had neither the time, energy, discipline, or technology to really support that plan. We travelled lightly, so didn't bother bringing a laptop, and blogging from my iPod turned out to be not that easy - except for the occasional Greyhound trip, where we had plenty of time, not much to do, and free wifi. Anyways, I'm back now, and I am going to tell you all about our trip, probably more than anyone in the world wants to know! But I need to make some sense of it myself, so it will come in pieces, I suspect.

Because the things that stick out to me most vividly are fairly random experiences, most of which became inside jokes between Andy and I (and probably annoyed everyone else we spent time with on our travels).

Like our first day in Hong Kong, after a full morning of walking around, we spent the afternoon wandering through the "Ladies' Markets" - a series of laneways tightly packed with stalls selling all varieties of sunglasses, fans, umbrellas, tee shirts, mobile phone cases, and other trinkets. We were approached by a woman who handed us a flyer for a foot massage and proceeded to give us a sales pitch, in perfect english that was so well rehearsed. We were promised that we could both get foot massages at the same time, that it was relaxing, and most importantly (we could tell it was important because it was repeated so many times), that we would have a good and awesome experience. We totally should have gotten that foot massage.

Or our last day in Dublin. We had spent the day on a tour of County Wicklow, just south of Dublin, which is the backdrop for movies such as Braveheart and P.S. I love you, and is full of stunning scenery like peat bogs and mountain lakes. It was a gorgeous day, but confirmed to Andy and I that we are not really organised tour people. Too group-y for our liking. We bought some bread and hummus for dinner in a Dublin park, and then caught the Luas, the local tram, back to our stop. We decided to take the elevator from the stop down to ground level, and when we got in there was a big puddle on the floor. Andy joked that it looked like pee, but neither of us really thought it was. But, moments before the door closed, a Dublin local got in, looked, and said "Ahh, they've pissed in it already!" in an angry tone. He proceeded to have a conversation with us all the way down about how he takes the elevator every day, and every day there is piss in the elevator. We made sure to scuff our shoes off on the grass on our walk back to our house.

Luckily, I kept a good travel journal for most of the trip, so I have some basis for thinking back about the things we did, the food we ate, and how energetic or cranky we were at the time. So I'll get to all of those things, but for now, while I overcome jet lag and get over the mountain of work waiting for me, I leave you with these few snapshots.

zPizza

2011-10-14T23:38:00.000+10:00

Here is another example of what DC has to offer. A few short blocks from the mall and the museums (and in fact, right outside the portrait museum) is a place called zpizza. I think they are a DC chain, because we also saw one in the burbs where we were staying.

Zpizza has a number of pre-determined pizza choices, as well as salads and sandwiches, and a build-your-own pizza. To do this you choose a crust, a toppings, and a cheese- and one of the choices is 'vegan'.

We opted for the Berkeley Vegan, with loads of veggies. The crust was crunchy, the veggies were plentiful, and the cheese (which we have previously found a bit rich) was a nice accompaniment without being overwhelming. And this generous lunch for two only set us back $19.25.

Score another one for DC. But now we're on a Greyhound travelling to upstate NY to visit family!

Vegan Cupcake

2011-10-14T10:20:00.000+10:00

Hi from Washington, DC. This is easily one of the most vegan friendly cities we've been to, in the sense that so many non-vegan places have clearly labeled vegan options. Like this cupcake we found from Red Velvet Cupcakery, on 7th street.

They have two vegan cupcakes, the black velvet and the white velvet. I chose white velvet, which was soft and fluffy and vanilla-licious.

Mac and chreese

2011-10-06T21:26:00.000+10:00

We've made it to NYC, after passing through Hong Kong, Switzerland, Scotland, and Ireland. And I promise there is more to come about all of those stops. But for now, look what I found on my (first ever) visit to Whole Foods on E Houston St - vegan Mac and cheese, in a box. We got some to cook in our apartment - shells as well as wholemeal elbows. We also cooked some baby portobellas and mixed them through. The result was easy, but a bit underwhelming. Not as delicious as the stuff we make at home, but hey! Vegan Mac and cheese! In a box!

Quick Update - Switzerland.

2011-09-30T13:11:00.000+10:00

We spent a few days in Switzerland, and while I'll write a proper post later, here are a few images for now...

Zurich.

Zurich - Gross Munster.

Swan on the Zurich river.

St Gallen.

St Gallen Cathedral.

St Gallen Cathedral details.

Quick Update - Hong Kong

2011-09-27T22:11:00.000+10:00

Okay, so not so good at the posting while travelling thing. I have excuses, but I won't bother because I'm in a public library in Aberdeen, Scotland, with only 21 minutes of internet time left.

Instead, I will show you a few quick photos of Hong Kong, with the promise of much more to come, next time I have a chance.

The big Buddha, Lantau Island.

Dragon fruit at a market in Mongkok.

Hong Kong Island at night across the harbour.

Hong Kong Island at sunset.

Fresh bean curd in a market in Hung Hom.

Fried tofu from a street stall near our hotel.

Leaving on a jet plane...

2011-09-14T12:09:00.000+10:00

Hi from Cairns airport! We've started off on our Round the World trip.

I normally don't announce my absences beforehand on this blog, because people in Townsville read this, and really it's probably not that difficult to figure out where we live. But we have someone living at our place while we're away this time. So any would-be home invaders can just suck it.

Also this trip is a long one, and I'm hoping to blog on the way, which will make it hard to pretend I'm in Townsville and everything is normal. So be aware that my posting may be irregular (not that it hasn't been for months) and my reading of your blogs will probably nosedive. But I will try to post whenever I can in the next few weeks, even if it is just the odd photo.

For now, I'm off to Hong Kong!

Submission Cake

2011-09-09T14:32:00.000+10:00

Andy submitted his PhD today. Aside from giving Nacho a comfy perch from which to disapprove...

This milestone represents a great opportunity to make cake, and eat (and possibly drink a little, too). But instead of just any cake, I somehow got the idea to make the cake in the shape of a butterflyfish, because that is the group of fishes he studied throughout his PhD. Andy was totally sceptical that it would work, but I received encouragement via Facebook and the tea room at work. So I forged ahead.

First, I traced the fish, Chaetodon plebeius, onto baking paper and then scanned it in and blew it up to pan-sized.

Then I used more baking paper to trace the shape and cut it out, to make my template.

The next step was to bake the cakes. I decided to do two rectangle cakes, so the fish could be swimming in a blue ocean.

Once the cakes were cool, I "glued" my template down with a bit of icing, to keep it from moving around, and then cut around it to get the fish shape right.

A thin layer of blue icing on the bottom, then I put the fish-shaped cake on top and coated in yellow icing.

Some tidying up of icing (tip from watching my mum: a butter knife or finger dipped in water is the perfect way to get a smooth icing finish), and then adding on of details like stripes, a blue patch, and a fin. All this was done before 10.30am, because I was super excited and couldn't wait!

Finally, I finished with the "black" (aka light brown and chocolate) stripe and spot, and used a little piece of strawberry for an eyeball.

A final tidy-up, and in the end we had to swap the strawberry (which was oozing juice and messing up the cake) for a dried cherry, but I'm pretty chuffed with the end result.

Congratulations, Andy!

Chia pudding

2011-09-07T10:58:00.001+10:00

Since we're sting ready to head overseas, we're trying to eat up all the food in the house. Half a jar of chia seeds made me think of all the blog posts I've seen about chia pudding.

I made this one by mixing 1/4 cup of chia seeds with a tin of coconut milk. The first night we ate it plain with zucchini bread. The second time round we mixed with mashed banana and sprinkled with cinnamon. Finally, what you can see above, Andy mixed in some boysenberry jam, which I'm currently eating for morning tea as I experiment with mobile blogging from my iPod.Since we're getting ready to head overseas, we're trying to eat up the food in the house. Half a jar of chia seeds made me think of all the blog posts I've seen about chia pudding.

Take that, Sanitarium Roast

2011-09-05T08:13:00.000+10:00

I've done stuffed seitan roasts pretty regularly. And we recently forayed into the territory of un-stuffed, and also un-excellent, storebought seitan roast.

So on a day when we had very empty cupboards, I decided to try creating a more excellent version of a seitan roast, without the stuffing - because this was a weeknight dinner, so in addition to can't-be-arsed syndrome, I didn't want to eat too much.

I followed the same recipe that we used at christmas this year, minus the stuffing. It took about 10 minutes to put together, 20 minutes to steam in the pressure cooker, and then, and then and then! I wrapped it up in yuba, to form a deliciously crunchy crust. A quick glaze with soy sauce & olive oil, and it went into the oven for 40 minutes, along with some kipfler potatoes, and carrots.

The result was at least 17 times better than Sanitarium's version, less salty, and a way to use okara. And it wasn't even that much work. And it had a crunchy skin!

Soy Cheese

2011-09-03T16:13:00.000+10:00

Andy was recently away for two weeks, diving for money in cold water. Since I was home alone, I decided to splurge a little and impulsively bought some Kingland Soy Cheese. We've bought this before and didn't hate it, but it isn't often for sale in our local shop, and in any case we're fairly unwilling to spend money on luxuries like soy cheese. But, for whatever reason, I thought this would be a good idea.

I thought about the best way to make use of it, and settled on eggplant parma. This was lazy-style -- I cooked the eggplant slices in a bit of oil in the frying pan until they were nice and soft. Then I topped with a bit of jar sauce and a slice of soy cheese, and put it under the griller.

As I was eating it, I congratulated myself on a super easypants dinner that was also yummy. Except, every now and then I got a flash that wasn't so yummy. So I tried a little nibble of the soy cheese on its own and ... it kind of tasted like puke. Not good.

Later in the week, I tried making nachos, and came to the same conclusion. With avocado, the cheese was tolerable. But as a dominant flavour, it was totally vom-y. After Andy came home, we tried it on pizza - I couldn't even finish it without picking off the cheese.

Kingland Soy Cheese Fail.

Kitchen Invention

2011-08-28T09:36:00.001+10:00

Two years ago now, Andy came up with a pretty stellar idea: garlic bread zucchini.

I have posted about them twice before, but without much detail. But we've eaten them a few times recently, and I really love them, so I thought I would expand a little.

A crunchy, golden garlic bread zucchini served with roasted potatoes, a chickpea burger,

a foil-roasted beetroot, and some corn on the cob.

This recipe combines the crunchy, garlicky-ness of garlic bread, with the cuteness and healthy-ness of stuffed zucchini. Here's how it goes:

One thick slice (or two pre-sliced bread slices) of multigrain bread, cut into crouton-sized chunks
half a head of roasted garlic
a good drizzle of olive oil
salt & pepper
1 zucchini

In a bowl, coarsely mash up the garlic cloves with a fork. Mix in the bread and stir. Slice the zuke in half lengthwise and carefully scoop out the insides. Chop up the flesh, and then mix it in the bowl with the bread chunks. Pour over 2-ish tablespoons of olive oil, or enough to coat the bread. Stir it up, and season with salt and pepper. Pack the bread mix into the zucchini halfs, pressing in with your hands to keep it nice and tidy. Then, bake or cook under the griller - this part is even more variable than the rest of the recipe. We usually co-bake, so cook these anywhere from 180 to 220. They take 20-30 minutes, and you know they're done when the top goes all golden and crunchy.

Look, it's fully possible that this wasn't a completely original invention - someone else, somewhere, may have come up with the idea well before us! But, this is as original as an idea gets, so I'm happy to claim it on Andy's behalf. Because it is pretty fantastic.

Crunchy

2011-08-25T15:39:00.000+10:00

Sometimes eating is about delicious flavours, but sometimes it is all about texture.

This sandwich was a pretty fantastic textural meal -- thin slices of seitan, fried up until nice and crunchy, so they even made a crunching noise when you bit into them; soft white (unhealthy but so smooth and yum) bread rolls; smooth & creamy avocado; crisp and fresh salad. Luckily the flavours were good, too, but this sandwich was a textural joy.

alle Melanzane

2011-08-21T10:26:00.000+10:00

My carbon footprint is not doing so well these days. Of course we still ride our bikes to uni most days (I'm up to more than 1500km for the year so far!), and barely drive anywhere, and don't buy much stuff. But, since the start of July, I have flown to Perth and Melbourne, and been a passenger on a drive to Cairns and back. Andy has been a passenger in a road trip down to Keppel Island, about 10-12 hours of highway driving. And we're in the final planning stages for a Round The World trip which will put all kinds of nasty emissions out there on our behalf. So I'm feeling a little guilty.

So when a friend (hi James!) offered me some garden-fresh produce, of course I said yes. In terms of 'food miles', I'm going to go ahead and assume these eggplants (and some yummy cucumbers) had a grand total of zero -- because they were transported by bicycle.

And they were super yummy, cooked down for half an hour or so, then mixed with tomatoes and herbs, following the recipe for Spaghetti alle Melanzane from Urban Vegan. Except, instead of spaghetti, I served with gnocchi.

Because the other thing that suffers with all of this going places is spare time, so quick easy meals like this one are a necessity!

Pizza, rolled

2011-08-06T07:24:00.000+10:00

When I was growing up, we ordered pizza fairly regularly from the local pizza place, Rocco's. When I was a bit older, I usually went for a calzone, rather than pizza. These were essentially just cheese, cheese and more cheese, encased in dough, with some garlic on top. With some red sauce on the side for dipping, of course.

When I went to uni, the local pizza place, Sergi's sold what are colloquially known as 'fat bags'. On the menu, they are called a 'pizza roll' -- basically, a pizza with red sauce and cheese, and pepperoni optional, folded in half and deep fried. They were good, in a disgusting way, and I only ever ate a few of them. Instead, I fell in love with the *other* local pizza place, Josie's, version of the pizza roll, which was not deep fried, had a better crust, and could be filled with anything.

Then, I went vegan. Ordering calzones or pizza rolls from pizzerias became a thing that doesn't happen anymore. I tried, in the early days of living with Andy, to make some yummy calzones but... they weren't so hot. At the time, my crusts were grainy, rather than stretchy, and were always too thick. So Andy was all, 'ew, calzones'.

But I convinced him to let me have another go, now that I've gotten better at pizza dough. I decided to fill it with ratatouille, a folded version of the ratatouille pizza we invented a few years ago.

So I made my dough, split it into a few balls, and rolled each one really thinly - because the crust puffs as it bakes, so it is always thicker than you expect. I piled up my ratatouille.

Folded and twisted the seam.

And then baked them. And I'm happy to report, they were a success! Aaand, I forgot to take a final photo, but they looked much like the pre-baked version, only browner.

Rolled pizza is back on the menu - yay!

Black Sapotes are totes awesome.

2011-07-31T15:02:00.000+10:00

Back in October 2007 I posted about the delicious tropical fruit, the Black Sapote. At the risk of being repetitive, I'm going to do another post about this fab fruit -- it was nearly 4 years ago, and I have new things to say this time anyways! In October 2007, and for maybe a year or more, Andy and I were going through a phase where we bought them nearly every week. Then, for some reason, we stopped buying them. Until a few weeks ago, when I saw a basket of $1 sapotes at the market, and I said, "We're getting one". Andy picked a big one, but then the stall-holder pulled out an even BIGGER one from the back of her truck. So we bought two.

I put it next to a gift card, so you can see how big they are.

Black Sapotes are hard and green when you buy them. You can't buy them much riper than this, because they are too delicate -- even picking them up can be tricky, so transporting them ain't gonna happen. Look at what happens to the bottom when they go ripe -- the weight of the fruit pushes down, and the bottom goes super flat.

Just ignore all the mess in the background.

You can slow the ripening process by putting firm sapotes in the fridge until a few days before you want them to ripen. Then, once you bring them back to room temperature, they finish ripening and away you go.

The big one ripened much quicker than the littlie.

Black Sapote also makes a yummy port, so if you're ever in Far North Queensland you should treat yourself to a tasting at Shannonvale Tropical Fruit Winery.

Black Sapote is, as I said in 2007, also known as the Chocolate Pudding Fruit. However, they don't really taste all that chocolatey. If you think really hard about it, you can faintly taste a bit of chocolate, but that may just be imagined. It's hard to say. What they do taste like is yummy - sort of persimmony, which is unsurprising since the two fruits are in the same family.

So what things can you do with a Black Sapote? This is what we've done recently...

1) In a pie. Scoop the flesh, separating out the seeds. Mash or blend it up with a splash of Cointreau.

Pour into a pre-baked Granola Nut Crust (the best recipe from The Ultimate Uncheese Cookbook, in my opinion). Chill, and eat.

This was actually a bit of a fail, because I didn't mix anything, like agar, into the fruit to make it set. So instead, I put it in the freezer.

2) In ice cream. I made an easy-pants custard with coconut milk simmered with a cinnamon stick, and then a bit of corn flour. Once it cooled, I blended in the flesh of a Black Sapote, took out the cinnamon, and churned it in the ice cream maker. Cinnamon + Sapote = a super yummy flavour combo.

3) With a spoon. Still the easiest, and possibly the best way to eat sapote -- straight up.

Have you ever tried a Black Sapote? Were you convinced of their chocolate-likeness, or a skeptic like me?

Getting Stuffed

2011-07-29T15:43:00.000+10:00

Back to school... the semester started again on Monday, along with other things to keep me busy, which is why I have neglected my blog this week. But for the next 6 weeks, I will be less busy than Andy, so it's time for me to take the cooking & cleaning responsibilities back on while he finishes his PhD! Here's an easy-pants dinner that is healthy and tasty (and which was alluded to in an earlier post, elliciting requests for a recipe).

Stuffed Chokoes

Step 1: get a choko. Choose a nice firm one.

Cut it in half, lengthwise.

Put it in a bowl of water, or under running water, straight away. This will wash away the sap, or latex, or whatever it is that makes your hands sticky for days.

Put the chokoes into a steamer basket cut-side down, and steam them for about 15 minutes, flipping them over 2/3s of the way through the cooking time.

While the chokoes steam away, you can start to get your stuffing together. Crush up a healthy teaspoon of dried wakame seaweed. Mix this with about 2 teaspoons of nori flakes (or 2 teaspoons of cut up nori sheets -- kitchen scissors are easiest for cutting up nori!).

Cut a slice of bread or two into small pieces.

Grate a carrot.

Mix the seaweed, bread, and carrot in a bowl. Then add a teaspoon each of paprika, stock powder, and celery seeds. Alternatively, you can ditch the stock and use celery salt in it's place. Or use, you know, real celery. Put some kind of herb in, preferably fresh. In this batch, we added fresh thyme. Parsley and oregano also work well.

When your chokoes are cooked -- they should be only just tender, but still very firm (mushy chokoes are not so pleasant) -- let them cool. If you try to scoop the insides when they are hot, you will probably break the choko a bit, like I did here. That's okay - just not so pretty. When they have cooled off, scoop out the flesh with a spoon, being sure to leave a thick enough edge all the way around. As you scoop, some watery stuff will pool into the choko. Pour this into the stuffing bowl.

Chop up the choko flesh, and add it to the stuffing mix. Also add a splash of olive oil, and check your choko shells to see if they need to be drained off again. If you've got most of the liquid from the chokoes, the stuffing is probably wet enough. If not, add water, a teaspoon at a time, until it is just moist. Taste it, and adjust the seasonings to your liking.

Put the stuffing into the choko shells.

Use your hands to pack the stuffing in tightly - you can really fill these up pretty full!

Put them in the oven -- they can go at pretty much any temperature, if you adjust the time accordingly. But if you want some guidance, try 180 (350F) for 20 to 30 minutes. The top of the stuffing should get crunchy, but the choko should still be tender and non-mushy.

Eat. Here, with sweet potatoes, seitand, and beetroot.

Altogether, you can put this dish together with ~10 minutes of hands-on time, and if you make the stuffing while the chokoes cook and/or cool, it can be a pretty efficient meal. And the stuffing recipe is really easy to vary, so it doesn't need to get boring -- though chokoes and seaweed are a very yummy combination, and seaweed is good for you, so this is our most common choko-stuffing recipe.

The Tropical Vegan Home: Happiness = Colour!

2011-07-20T08:21:00.006+10:00

I've read a few blog posts recently about happiness -- The Little One is back(!!) with a post about her happiness project, and Wayfaring Chocolatarian Hannah discusses various forms of happiness, such as goblins and cake. These posts are a good reminder to me that I need to be happy! I have been, for the past few years, sometimes obnoxiously optimistic and upbeat and happy, but succumbed a bit to the drudgery of my first few months of actual work. But I'm determined to be a happy person again, and one of the things that makes me happy is bright colours.

A little while ago, I was starting to feel pretty down on our current rental unit. Probably because we've lived here for 4 full years now, and it was just starting to feel a bit samey-samey. And because we rent. This means that we can't paint walls, install shelves, and our real estate even gets funny about hooks getting put into the walls. In addition to the limitations to personalisation, we have never been able to sign a lease for longer than 12 months, so there is always a chance that we'll be moving out "soon". As a result of that, we have resisted accumulating much furniture, because we (well, Andy) don't want to have to move much stuff. So anyways, the off-white walls, tiles, and ceiling started to feel oppressive and I had to do something about it!

Also, our bookshelf was a bit overflowing. I had several trips of bringing anything remotely work-related to my shelves at uni, but we still had stacks of books on top.

So, when I saw a freecycle ad for a bookshelf, I said OMGYESPLZ! I was a little bit meh to find that it was white, but thought that would be easy to overcome. Originally intended for the spare room, this shelf ended up finding a home in the kitchen, instead, housing some cookbooks, and Nacho's food space.

And after a few weeks, some painting of previously-white goods, and some getting my craft on, these shelves provided an opportunity for some colour.

Only, this didn't solve the problem of our over-stuffed bookshelf, because none of those stacked on top made it to this one. But a few weeks later someone was selling two small shelves for only $10 (not each! for the pair!), so we finally got some more breathing room for our books.

Another easy-pants way of splashing some brightly-coloured cheer around involved yarn, and crocheting, which I enjoy - so this project had a double-happiness factor. I covered over our white throw-pillow with a straight-forward granny square.

It's double-sided, so we can swap it around depending on our mood.

And we pushed some thumb-tacks into previously-existing holes to spead out our collection of trinkets -- a Welsh love spoon, from my trip to Conwy in 2009, a cowry-shell turtle that a friend brought back from Micronesia, and our wedding hand-fasting cords, made of PNG shell money.

So overall, I'm feeling happier with the space. And less antsy to change things and move to a house (though still a little antsy for those things).

The irony is that the lease we've just signed is only for 6 months -- at our own request -- so we currently have the least certainty since moving in back in 2007!

Tropical Vegetables

2011-07-16T12:17:00.000+10:00

I've mentioned recently how happy I am that Townsville is in its best veggie-growing season at the moment. Andy and I have drastically slowed in our consumption of things like seitan, because we've just been eating veggies and more veggies for our meals.

One of the veggies that we pick up every now and again is the choko. These are known in different parts of the world as chayotes, mirlitons, chow chows, pear squashes, and the list goes on. Our most favourite way of cooking is to stuff it with a bready, seaweedy mixture and bake it for a while, so it's still tender-crisp. I've tried making it a few different ways, though, so it's not the same thing over and over. What we've discovered is that Andy likes choko best when it's just under-cooked -- overcooked it goes mushy and reminds him of those yellow button-squashes which he refers to as "those disgusting yellow shit things". I don't mind them mushy, but definitely prefer them on the crunchy side, where they are more like a cucumber in texture.

One way we cooked them was to slice thinly and saute in lemon juice, garlic, and parsley. We had these with mashed potatoes and crumbed seitan. These were a little too undercooked, or else a little too thickly sliced, because they took a lot of jaw-effort to eat. But they tasted good, and gave us a good idea of how good sauteed chokoes can be.

And, despite our previous experience with undercooked choko, I recently decided to try out a raw choko recipe. The cookbook Tropical Vegan has a recipe for Cucumber and Chayote Slaw, which I followed somewhat. It's more of a salad than a slaw, and it was good. Very thinly sliced choko (put it in a bowl of water while peeling to avoid getting latexy hands), thin slices of cucumber, chunks of pineapple, and some spicy flavours mixed together into a surprisingly nice salad.

The thing about this salad, though, was that although it was tasty and nice to eat, it didn't make either of us want to go back for more. So it sat in the fridge for a few days until we decided we had to finish off the leftovers before they spoiled. In the future, I'll make a half-batch, or make this when we're having people over and are more likely to finish in one go.

Served with lentil loaf, roasted beetroot, roasted carrot, and corn. Yes, we eat on a christmas plate year round.

My plans for the future (when we have a house, with a garden, of course) are to grow chokoes, since they go well here and can be used in lots of different ways. But for now, we'll keep experimenting with what we buy from the market.

Meat Pie

2011-07-10T10:45:00.000+10:00

As an Australian, Andy loves meat pie. I've never had a non-vegan meat pie, but I think we've made some pretty yummy renditions since I've lived here. There's something not just delicious, but also comforting, about food wrapped in puff pastry.

So when I was perusing the testing blog for Carla's newest cookbook, and I noticed "Australasian Meat Pie", I knew we had to make it.

And it was glorious. The filling was so thick and lovely -- our last few attempts at pie have been a bit, erm, runny. So when you cut them, the filling runs out in a soupy puddle. So this thick, gorgeous pie filling was exactly what Andy had in mind.

To up the Aussie street-cred, we served with beetroot (as well as roasty potatoes and corn on the cob).

Itchy Feet

2011-07-06T08:57:00.000+10:00

After living in Australia for five years, it's probably time I head home for a visit. Andy and I have been meaning to get home, but between expensive flights, and teaching/fieldwork schedules, it hasn't happened yet. Then we decided to go for a few weeks in October. Then, Andy got accepted to present at a conference. In Scotland. The week before we were planning to head to NY. It took a bit of negotiating, but finally we agreed on a very exciting, somewhat whirlwind, Round the World trip.

For those of you who are Facebook friends, this is old news. But, our itinerary looks like this:

5 days in Hong Kong
4 days in Switzerland, with possible day trips to Austria and/or Liechtenstein
5 days in Scotland - an overnight in Edinburgh, and then on to Aberdeen where the conference is
3 days in Dublin
5 or so days in New York City
1 or 2 days in Philadelphia
3 or 4 days in Washington, DC
Then to visit my parents, in Upstate NY. From there, we'll probably get out to Niagara Falls, at Andy's request, and maybe venture onwards to Toronto for a few days, before trekking back to St Lawrence uni, where I did my undergrad degree.

Because this is a work trip for Andy, there are certain parts that are non-negotiable in terms of times and locations. But, if anyone has any recommendations for things we should do, or places we should eat, in any of these locations, please please leave me a comment!

The leg in Hong Kong is what inspired us to snag two sets of chop sticks from Andy's parents' closet when we were visiting. Until that week, I had never, ever, in my life, successfully eaten with chop sticks. I had tried a few times, and all were miserable failures. But somehow, Andy's mum's description of how to use them just worked for me, and after playing around and grabbing random things for a few hours, I was able to eat with them. We're still practicing regularly, so we don't look like clowns when we get to Hong Kong.

And if simply reading this post gives you itchy feet, the tickets are pretty reasonable - we got this one from RoundAbout Travel. We've got a stack of travel guidebooks out of the library and can't wait for September to come!

Orange Cranberry Granola

2011-07-02T10:59:00.000+10:00

One of the reasons we timed our trip to Eden when we did was to coincide with Andy's mum's birthday. Sure, it was mainly because that was when the biggest gap in teaching and meetings was happening, but the timing was lucky.

For a gift, we brought down some beautiful (if I say so myself) granola.

It was orange-cranberry, with pecans.

It was a bit more work than the usual granola I make for myself, but it makes a lot (so there was lots of leftovers that stayed in Townsville and became my breakfast).

Here's the recipe.

1 orange
6 T. oil
1 1/2 c. fairly wet okara (which of course is the byproduct of soymilk making - if you don't have okara, you could probably use soy yogurt, soy milk, or even tofu blended up with some milk...)

6 cups rolled oats
3/4 c. pecans, roughly broken up
1 1/2 c. other stuff - in this batch, I used rice flakes, shredded coconut, and processed bran sticks
3/4 tsp. salt
3/4 c. brown sugar
1 packet of dried cranberries (maybe 1 1/2 to 2 cups?)

A few days before you want to make the granola, carefully peel the orange zest from the orange. Try to avoid getting much white stuff. Put the peels into a jar, pour the oil over, and cover it tightly and let it sit and get orangey for a week, or less if you're impatient. But just don't skip this step, since it makes all the difference between meh-granola, and holy shit this is good-granola. Squeeze your peel-less orange, or eat it and use another one when you need the juice. I got 3/4 c. of juice from my orange, which is perfect. You might need more than one orange, or perhaps less. If you squeeze a few days before you make the granola, freeze the orange juice and just defrost it when needed.

Once your oil smells sufficiently orangey, make your granola. In a jug or small bowl, combine the okara, orange juice, and oil (you can strain out the zest, or leave them in - we left them in).

In a large bowl, mix up your oats, nuts, other stuff, salt, and brown sugar. Try to mix until the brown sugar clumps are all pretty well broken up. Then pour in the wet stuff, and mix it all together really well. Probably use your hands. Once all your dry ingredients are no longer dry, mix in the cranberries.

If you have a dehydrator, spread the granola onto the sheets, and dry at 52C(125F) for 4 hours, spinning the trays around every hour.

If you don't, cook it like regular granola -- at 160C(320F), stirring every 15 minutes, for about an hour.

Either way, cook it until it's crunchy. Then let it cool on the trays before putting it into an airtight container.

Squeaky Clean

2011-06-28T08:13:00.006+10:00

I was a bit misleading when I mentioned that I had some homemade cleaning products to share - they aren't products for cleaning houses, but rather for cleaning yourself. Here's the thing: I've given up on shampoo, and soap.

In January, I was home alone and screwing around on the internet, and I followed a few random links and stumbled across some websites discussing the No Shampoo Method, and the Oil Cleanse Method. I read up on them. I was intrigued. I did some research, finding out the best ways to take up these soap-free, super-cheap, and gentle self-care techniques. I found lots, and lots, and LOTS of websites, blog posts, YouTube videos, and forum discussions. And I discovered that the only thing that can be concluded is that you have to work out what is best for your skin & hair. So here's how I do it, using these ingredients...

Hair
I haven't used shampoo since January. Instead, I wash my hair with a bicarb soda (baking soda) paste, and 'condition' with apple cider vinegar. Some people seem to use heaps more water than bicarb, and pour it over their hair. I tried that, but prefer a runny paste. I fill up a little container with bicarb...

And then add an equal amount of water (give or take a bit). Then I stir and stir, until it is a smooth paste.

Then, once a week, I take a big scoop of this paste and massage it into my head. I try to keep it to the roots, because it makes the ends of my hair a bit dry. I rub it in, and leave it on for about a minute, and then rinse. Be sure to rinse thoroughly - I've gotten out of the shower a few times and found a super white patch on my scalp.

I also keep a little jar of apple cider vinegar in the shower, next to a small plastic cup. After all the bicarb paste is rinsed out of my hair, I tip 1 to 2 Tablespoons of vinegar into the little cup, and then fill it up with water.

Then, I dip my hair into the cup, to make sure the ends get their fair share of the vinegar. After that, I tip the rest of the vinegar water over my hair. Again, rinse thoroughly. I like to end with a quick blast of cold water - it may be ineffective, but in my head it makes my hair shinier.

Once I get out of the shower, I towel-dry my hair and dab a bit of coconut oil on the ends. All of this works best, for me, if I wash my hair in the afternoon or evening. Then I let it air dry, and sleep on it. For some reason, this gives me smooth, shiny, and easy to work with hair. If I wash it in the morning, it goes a bit fuzzy.

As I mentioned above, I only need to do this once a week. On the other days, I keep my hair dry for my morning shower, and rinse with plain water for my afternoon or evening shower. My hair only smells like vinegar until it dries on the first day - after that, it's fine. And it doesn't get sweaty or greasy, even though I ride to and from uni each day. My hair is still as soft as it was when I was washing with shampoo, so I'm happy to save heaps and heaps of money by using cheap kitchen supplies!

Face
The Oil Cleanse method is based on the notion that "like dissolves like", which may or may not be scientifically true. In any case, it involves using oil to clean your face, and surprisingly, it works really well.

I mix my oils in a plastic bottle, which lasts for a few months. About 1/4 to 1/3 of the bottle gets filled with Castor Oil (which is available from the chemist - but behind the counter). I put a few drops of eucalyptus oil, for its antibacterial qualities. Then I top up the bottle with olive oil. The ratio of castor to olive oil depends on your skin type. If you have very dry skin, you can go up to half-half, but if your skin is on the oily side you should use more olive oil.

So, every evening, I pull back my hair and get maybe a teaspoon, at the most, of oil in my palm. Then, for 5 or 10 minutes, I rub it all over my face. It's great for dissolving makeup, and I can literally feel my pores unclogging while I rub. After a few minutes, I rinse. With the hottest water I can stand, I rinse and rinse with a cloth, rubbing the oil off. It takes a few rinses, and it's not finished until your face feels un-oily. Then I dry my face. I still use moisturiser after I'm finished - some people on the internet said they don't need to, but my skin gets too dry without it. I do this at night, and in the mornings I just rinse my face with plain water and then moisturise before putting on makeup.

Why bother?
To be honest, I had no problem with the facial cleanser and shampoos I was using before I started these homemade options in January. I was buying from Plant Essentials, which makes its products right here in Townsville, using certified organic plant ingredients. And they're not even that expensive. In fact, I still use their moisturisers and make up, because I truly love that shop.

But, (and this is an indication of my supreme laziness), I was home alone in January and the thought of going in to the city when I was running low on shampoo was unappealing. So I decided to try out these methods I had read about. And it turns out I like them. Neither method has revolutionised the quality of my skin or hair - some people on the internet seem to suggest it has for them, but for me, I haven't noticed much difference at all compared to soap and shampoo. Except, of course, for the price difference. Bicarb soda, apple cider vinegar, and oil are cheap, and since you don't use much, it really is very cost effective. The results look something like this:

So there you have it - my cheaper-than-chips, easy-pants homemade self-cleaning products. If you're interested and I haven't answered your questions, let me know in the comments - or do some googling, since there is a boatload of information on the interwebs.

Edenic

2011-06-26T14:11:00.000+10:00

Hi! I'm back! Back, that is, to a reasonable work load, done with marking, survived several deadlines, and feeling as light as a cloud for the past few days! It seems like months since our trip to Eden, but we returned home only about 3 weeks ago.

View Larger Map

This Eden trip was both a welcome break from the crazy, and a poorly timed interruption to my busy-busy schedule. But mainly, Eden is a soul-restoring place. The coastline is just beautiful. Eden is surrounded on three sides by extensive national parks and state forests. Andy's family home has a fantastic garden and views of the bay. And his parents are wonderful. So, aside from the cold, it was a great trip - and the cold wasn't even all that bad, since it meant we could light the fire.

On the first full day we were in Eden, we headed south to Green Cape, in one of the many national parks nearby. There, we were greeted with spectacular views, like these over Wonboyn and Disaster Bay.

The place was obviously windswept - the saltmarsh plants were all bent over. According to Andy's dad, this is where the weather from the south comes and turns, instead of heading north towards Eden.

We watched the waves crash over the rocks - and this was on a smooth, non-windy day.

Andy trekked down onto the rocks for a closer look. Note his "winter on top, summer on bottom" look involving a beanie-hat, long sleeves and layers, and then shorts and thongs.

We also went to Bittangabee, a secluded little beach in the state forest.

And Saltwater Creek, where this friendly-looking kangaroo turned out not to be so friendly, growling at Andy for getting too close.

On the other days, Andy's mum had to work, and I had some marking to do, but we also did lots of baking (pumpkin muffins, and chocolate birthday cake for Andy's mum) and cooking (roasted veggies up the wazoo). We headed into Bega so Andy could visit his grandma. On the way back, we stopped for chips in Merimbula, a summer resort town. The chips were disappointing - soggy, overpriced, and a small serve. But the scenery was good - we ate next to Bottom Lake, a saltwater lake with lots of boats and sea gulls.

Another day we went into Eden town, checking out the wharf, full of fishing boats (though, according to Andy, practically empty compared to when he was a kid).

And peering down at beautiful, but cold looking, Asling's beach.

We also helped Andy's parents clean out some of their closets - we came home with warm clothes for Andy, as well as some good Scanpan sauce pans and a few other kitchen bits, including two sets of chop sticks, so we can learn how to use them (this is foreshadowing for a future post...).

Snowed Under

2011-06-13T07:14:00.000+10:00

I've been a bit busy with work in the last few weeks, and this will continue for a few more. Between my part time job and some extra casual work I agreed to do, I'm up to my ears in marking, guest lectures, paper writing, and literature reviewing, and I have deadlines coming at me from all directions at the moment. So my presence in blog-land will be minimal for a bit.

But I'll be back! And when I have a bit more time to breathe, and a weekend that doesn't require hours of working, I will tell you about things like our recent trip to Eden, some homemade cleaning products I've been digging since earlier this year, a very mini kitchen makeover, some crochet adventures, and an upcoming, very exciting and very large trip Andy and I have now officially booked.

Until then, I'm leaving you with these 'Elvis Blondies', a peanut butter, banana and chocolate combination, from Vegan Bake Sale. These were yummy - but when cold, tasted a bit stale, so if you have the cookbook and make the recipe, I recommend bringing it up to room temperature at least, or warmer, for the most deliciousness.

Birthday Trifle

2011-06-03T09:20:00.000+10:00

Andy had a birthday recently, so despite his comments that he didn't want anything, gifts or food or anything, I got him a present anyways. I also wanted to make some kind of cake-like dessert, because what's a birthday if not a great excuse for cake? However, we were only a few days away from a long weekend to Eden (where we've just returned from, so more on that soon), so we were trying to empty out the pantry and avoid grocery shopping.

This made birthday dessert-making tricky, because we were out of cocoa, out of chocolate, out of pastry, out of frozen fruit, and a few other things. But I did notice a box of vegan jelly we bought at the Asian grocery store a few months ago. I was going to make some jelly. Then I though -- why not make trifle?

I settled on a simple but hopefully delicious vanilla bean-centric trifle to go along with our strawberry flavoured jelly. First, I made a vanilla bean cake, turning the recipe for Vanilla Bean Cupcakes from Vegan Bake Sale into a big cake. This didn't work all that well; for some reason the cake took twice as long as I expected to bake through. And it had a few funny bubbles. However, it was absolutely freaking delicious.

I make trifle by splitting my cake in half and spreading it with jam, before sandwiching it back together and cutting it into chunks. Those chunks go into the trifle dish (in our house, a deep-ish pan) and jelly gets poured over the top to set amidst the cake chunks. This goes against Andy's family's method, which involves setting the jelly separately, then breaking it up and putting on top of the cake that way. But luckily he's flexible, and willing to try new things.

Once the jelly sets, some vegan custard goes over the top.

Then I sprinkled on some toasted coconut.

I was struggling to come up with a whipped cream alternative, based on what we had in the house. But then it hit me - vanilla bean + coconut cream = Andy's favourite ice cream ever. Since we had both of those things, I made some ice cream, which we scooped on top of each serve of trifle.

The result was really, very yummy. The only thing this needed was a layer of real fruit. But for a quickly thrown together, using what we had on hand kind of dessert, I was pretty impressed with myself.

It's vegetable season again!

2011-05-31T08:47:00.007+10:00

Summer in Townsville isn't really veggie-friendly. Most stuff goes out of season, because it is too hot and wet for local crops. The markets dwindle to things like sweet potatoes, pumpkins, sometimes zucchinis and eggplants. This summer was worse than usual, thanks to most of Queensland being submerged in some floods and another good chunk of Queensland getting worked by Cyclone Yasi. Instead of loads of fresh veggies over the summer, Andy and I had a lot of potatoes and not much else -- everything else was from far away, and expensive as a result.

But now that it's cold, we have been able to buy lots of veggies of all kinds, grown nearby and available very cheaply. Instead of needing to rely on seitan-centric meals, we've returned to some pretty hardcore veggie-on-veggie meals. (I realised only after I typed that sentence that it sounds really dirty. But, I'm gonna let it stay.) Here are some of the vege-ful meals we've been indulging in...

Beautiful roasted Brussels sprouts, with potatoes and carrots, and a side of baked beans.

Peanut Curry Casserole, a variation on a recipe from Urban Vegan, full of broccoli, fresh tomato, and chickpeas. On the side, a yummy salad with cos lettuce (also known as romaine), carrot, cucumber, avocado, sunflower seeds and more tomato.

Eggplant parma (topped with a little sprinkle of breadcrumbs, rather than cheese), with Garlic Bread Zucchinis -- these are an Andy original, a garlicky bread-based stuffing inside of little zukes. And some potato wedges.

And some yummy veggie fried rice, with zucchini, green peas, and carrots. Coincedentally, shortly after eating this dinner we tuned into MasterChef, where the pressure test involved fried rice.

I'm so happy to have a fridge full of veggies again.

Comfort Food Dinner

2011-05-29T08:32:00.001+10:00

When he was sick recently, Andy requested a dinner of baked beans and fried up potatoes -- sort of like brinner, but without anything sweet. We had some broccoli, so for variety and nutrition, I threw some in with the potatoes.

The baked beans were tomatoey, flavoured with curry powder and mustard seeds, a bit sweet and a tiny bit spicy. They were chunky, and delicious. The potatoes were crunchy on the outside and beautifully soft inside, and the broccoli made it feel a bit like a fancy cafe breakfast, instead of just homemade breakfast potatoes.

This brinner hit the spot. It was exactly what we both wanted.

A fortnight later, Andy requested a repeat. He wanted exactly the same dinner. Except we both had a few ideas for how to improve it just slightly. And I couldn't remember the precise method I used for the beans and potatoes. So the result was a bit disappointing. It was probably partially a result of having an unrealistic memory of our excellent, perfect first brinner. But it was also just not as good.

Note to self: write down the recipe when the meal is good, and remember that 'improvements' usually lead to disappointment.

Confusing Vegetables.

2011-05-27T16:31:00.000+10:00

It has been pretty darn chilly here now that winter has arrived - it was 9 degrees celsius this morning! That's cold. It makes Andy go into hibernation mode.

It also leads to numerous oven-baked dinners, which is pretty delicious. Root vegetables always strike me as good cold weather food, so when I saw a box of "Swedes and Turnips" at the market one Sunday I grabbed one and brought it home.

I then set about trying to determine if it is a Swede or a Turnip. Google confused things even more. But I think I've figured it out -- a swede is also known as a rutabaga in the US, "neeps" in Scotland, and "turnips" in Ireland. They're the big ones, and sort of orange. A turnip, though, is smaller and whiter than a swede. And I have no idea what they are called in Scotland and Ireland.

Once I figured out the difference, I had to figure out which vegetable we had. From the outside, I thought: swede.

Then I peeled it, and it looked very white -- not at all orange fleshed, as google suggested would be the case for a swede. So I thought: turnip.

Then I chopped it up, and it was a little bit orange. It also smelled a little bit like a skunk. At this point, I had no idea what this stupid root was.

Then I boiled it, along with some potatoes, in preparation for baking (this is our favourite way to get potatoes that are fluffy inside and crunchy outside without too much oil). After boiling it was definitely orange, so I've finally decided that we bought a swede, rather than a turnip.

After roasting, we served it up with some veggie casserole.

I liked the swede -- mainly because it was something a bit different to usual. Andy wasn't such a fan.

Product Review - Vegie Roast with Rosemary Mint Glaze

2011-05-23T19:17:00.000+10:00

This product is by no means new, but Andy and I have baulked at the $7-ish price tag since they appeared on the shelves a few years ago. We tend to pass by that area of the supermarket with barely a glance, because we would rather make our own seitan-related products than pay too much for them. Especially because those Sanitarium roasts look teeny.

However, we love a good bargain.

Last week, Andy was in the shop and found them marked down 66%, to $2.37. So he bought four. Never mind that we had never tried them, and they might totally suck. Even if they were terrible, we would find some use for them in the coming weeks (three went straight into the freezer).

This photo comes from Sanitarium.

I had heard from others that the roasts were yum but for the rosemary mint glaze they come with. I was a bit surprised to see that "glaze" really meant powder. But, we decided that we would try the roast following package directions the first time, to properly judge it. So we coated in oil, and then rolled in the funny orange powder. Then we popped it in the oven with some potatoes, broccoli, and a stuffed tomato made by Andy.

The results? Meh. First of all, the things I had heard about the glaze were true - it is not nice. Andy, especially, hated it. It was too sweet, and tasted very artificial. So, for the remaining three roasts in our freezer, that orange powder will not be part of the meal.

Second, the texture was a bit funny. It reminded me of that highly processed log of 'chicken loaf' that my parents very occasionally bought from the deli for sandwiches. It wasn't bad, and Andy kind of dug it, but it bothered me a little. I kind of prefer single-textured seitan. Maybe because it reminds me less of meat. In my opinion, chicken-ish textures are good in small, thin doses -- vegan chicken nuggets or cutlets are okay, but a big log: not so much.

Finally, it was pretty puny. It purports to be four serves. I know that Andy and I are greedy gutses, but we ate the whole thing in one meal, with an awful lot of side dishes. It wouldn't go very far in a 'family roast' setting. Andy ate two thirds of the whole roast in about 6 bites.

In summary, we think this product has potential. With a different flavour, especially. We might try slicing it up and frying, instead of roasting. Or possibly marinating, and wrapping in yuba before roasting. Andy's opinion is that if he saw those for 50% off, he would buy one, and for 66% off he would stockpile. My opinion wasn't so favourable, but I didn't hate them.

Getting a head

2011-05-21T10:39:00.000+10:00

On a recent excursion into our local grocery shop, I saw cabbages on special for only $2.90 a head. They were pretty big, so that struck me as a good deal and I asked Andy if he wanted a cabbage. He said yes, on the condition that I find one "as big as New Zealand".

I picked one of the largest cabbages - not the biggest of the bunch, but the one that felt heaviest, to ensure we got the best value for money. Out of curiosity, I put it on the scale -- it weighed in at 2.5 kilos. That's just over 5.5 pounds, which is a lotta cabbage.

So how can two people get through a cabbage the size of New Zealand while it's still fresh?

First up, we shredded a small wedge and mixed it with leftover mashed potatoes, some flour, and a few other ingredients to make bubble and squeak. We put this mix into the freezer, for an easy weeknight dinner later on.

Later on, we pulled it out for an easy weeknight dinner... but a lot of liquid must have come out of the cabbage in the freezing and thawing process, because the mixture was very sloppy. Instead of adding some extra flour, Andy tried just dropping spoonfuls onto the baking tray. The results were not very crispy but had a good flavour. The messy bubbles&squeaks are in the background behind some cheesy-ish broccoli bake, and next to some wilted ceylon spinach.

Then we used another little bit of it, with brown rice and seaweed, to stuff some chokoes. (Served with some potatoes and dukkah-crusted eggplant -- that eggplant was also huge, practically the size of Tasmania.)

A good chunk got fried up with sliced potatoes in a dinner that reminded me of something my mum might make. As a side dish, Andy mixed up some broccoli, sundried tomatoes, olives, and dijon vinaigrette.

Then we discovered Andy's new favourite way to eat cabbage. Using the basic stir fry sauce from this cashew seitan recipe, this semi-Chinese-ish cabbage was salty and saucy and everything good. It was far superior to the BBQ seitan ribs we served it alongside.

We were finally left with just under a quarter of our original New Zealand-sized head of cruciferous veggie, which we cut in half and baked. I put both wedges into a loaf pan, put a little chicken-style stock into the bottom, and drizzled on olive oil, salt and garlic before putting it into the oven. Then we sprinkled with some garlic chives. The result was tender yet still textural, and one of my favourite ways to eat cabbage. Served up with roasted potatoes, baked broccoli and a tiny bit of seitan, just to see how an experimental batch tasted.

And that, my friends, is how two people get through a cabbage the size of New Zealand in a mere five dinners (with some leftovers for lunch). Take that, cabbage that would dwarf me, if it weren't for what my mum referred to as 'football player's shoulders'.

I'm an iYuppie

2011-05-19T15:43:00.001+10:00

A few weeks ago I decided to join the 21st century by purchasing my first mp3 player, which also happens to be my first mobile device that has web access. This is exciting becAuse it means i can do things like go to places with free wifi and post typo riddled blog posts, or videos of my cat earing lemon grass. With background music!

Banishing Seitan

2011-05-12T08:41:00.001+10:00

I know I post a lot of seitan-centric meals on this blog. It's not that Andy and I worship seitan or anything - it's just that we always have some in the freezer, as it's a good way to use up okara, which we produce in droves from making soy milk. But in reality, we also eat lots of non-gluten based proteins, like lots of beans, and sometimes tofu.

As much as I love tofu, our consumption of the white block has dropped dramatically for a few reasons. First of all, for a few years it was consistently marked down to ridiculously cheap prices at our local Cole's. Like, every month we were able to purchase it for $5 a kilo, or often cheaper. We tended to buy every tofu with a reduced sticker on the shelf, filling up our freezer for later consumption. The only limit to our purchases was that we were usually on foot and literally couldn't carry any more home. When Wesfarmer's bought out Cole's, they must have put in some efficiency measures, or something, because we haven't seen a reduced-to-clear block of tofu in yonks. Which is very sad. And although tofu at regular price is still a pretty good deal, we just can't get over our past - we are always reluctant to pay full price for tofu, so we only buy it every now and then.

For a while we were regularly making our own, which totally rocked my soy-based world. Homemade tofu is seriously yummy. But then our stocks of the little salty tofu coagulant started to dwindle. We keep meaning to order more, but then not ordering more, so in the meantime we have made tofu less and less often. We're down to one little packet. Consider this my public note to self that I must purchase more coagulant!

So anyways, when we do have tofu on hand these days, it's difficult to decide what to do with it. One recipe we keep coming back to is this dijon and lemon baked version that Andy found while wasting time at uni one day many months ago. I don't know his source, so unfortunately cannot properly attribute (if it's your recipe, let me know!). We seriously love it, so in the spirit of sharing, I will put it up here for you all - if you try it, let me know what you think.

Dijon-Lemon Baked Tofu

1 block of tofu, cut into 'steaks' or triangles
2 T. soy sauce
2 T. lemon juice
2 T. olive oil
2 T. dijon mustard
1 t. sugar
1 t. basil
1 t. thyme
freshly ground black pepper

In a jug, whisk together all of the ingredients except for tofu. Give it a little taste and adjust the flavours if it needs it. Beware - it's a punchy marinade, that makes for a punchy dinner, just how we like it! Put the tofu into a rectangular glass baking dish and pour the marinade over. Give it a good shake to cover the tofu evenly. Marinate for at least an hour, or longer in the fridge if you have the foresight. Turn the tofu over once in the middle of your marinating time. Bake at 190 (375F) for about 30 minutes, until the marinade is thick and the tofu is delicious.

Cashew Seitan

2011-05-10T08:19:00.003+10:00

We've recently had a regular and large stash of broccoli in the fridge, thanks to cheap prices. We've also recently had some very tiring work days, and come home with no real desire to make a gourmet, three-course menu. On one of these days, Andy suggested that we have a stir fry - we had seitan to go along with the broccoli.

I also recalled a small jar of cashews that we've had for a few weeks, and I recalled one of my fave dishes from vegan asian-style eateries in the past (like Peace Harmony in Sydney). I was all "let's have cashew chicken!". Andy was all "is that going to be any good...?" Well, duh, of course.

I quickly googled some recipes, looking at a few before settling on the simplest. Of course I veganised it, and made some other minor tweaks to make it more to our liking. So I present to you, quick, easy, and delicious Cashew Seitan (or tofu, if gluten makes you ill!).

Excuse the blurry photo - I have to post this despite the shonkiness of my camera skills because it is so good.

2 chicken-style seitan cutlets (we use mark-style seitan)
2 T. soy sauce
1 t. sugar
3 cloves garlic, minced
1 small chilli, minced
2 T. lemon juice
3/4 c. chicken-style stock
4 t. corn flour
3 T. vegetable oil
1 onion, roughly chopped
1 head of broccoli, chopped
1 carrot, cut into match sticks
1 zucchini, cut into match sticks
1 bunch of water spinach (kang kong) or other greenery
1/3 c. cashews

Slice seitan into strips and marinate in soy sauce, sugar, garlic, chilli, lemon juice, and 1 T. oil for at least 20 minutes. In a jug, whisk together corn flour and stock, and set aside. In a frying pan or wok, heat remaining 2 T. oil over high-medium heat (on the higher side of medium high, that is). Cook the onion until it's clear, then add carrots. Stir for a minute or two. Add zucchini, stir another minute. Add broccoli, stir one more minute! Then, add the seitan and all the marinade. Stir it around and cook for about 5 minutes. Add the greens. Re-whisk the corn flour/stock mixture, then stir this into the stir fry. Stir it for 1 or 2 minutes, until it's nice and glazy. Then add the cashews and stir it all up and serve on your best christmas plate with rice. This served both of us for dinner, with a bit left over for lunch.

Despite his initial scepticism, Andy has quickly become a fan of this stir fry - we have used the basic sauce since in other stir fries. The only thing he didn't love was the cashews, but that's okay because it meant more for me.