Complementary baking

Some of my favourite foods come from the oven—cookies, cakes, pies, roasted veggies.... But using the oven to bake just one thing isn’t very efficient. Preheating and maintaining the temperature in a fairly big airspace just for one pan of food uses a lot of electricity and isn’t good for the environment or the wallet. Not to mention, it makes the house all kinds of hot—this is a good thing in the winter, but not so much in the hotter months. And even though autumn officially started in Australia on Saturday, it’s still pretty warm here.

None of this is enough to stop us from using the oven. We just try to be a bit smarter when we do heat it up. In our house, the oven is stuffed full whenever it is turned on. This usually takes some major strategery—which pans will we use that can fit together; which dish needs to be on which shelf; how long and at what temperature does each dish need to bake; when should batters be mixed and poured into pans...

Sunday, after eating pancakes and reading the paper, Andy and I had a long, drawn-out baking-fest. He was bored (I was doing the crossword) so I suggested he bake some cookies. He flipped through our newest cookbook acquisition, Joy of Vegan Baking, and decided to make both Lemon Bars and Jam-Filled Oat Bran Muffins. And since we had the oven on anyways, he declared, we should have something baked for dinner; his choice was the potato pizza from the latest issue of Vegan Voice magazine (which I didn’t get photos of). And then he requested that I be in charge of the Lemon Bars.

Andy started on the muffins in the early afternoon. Instead of oat bran, he ground up some rolled oats. He kept the wet ingredients separate, in the fridge, waiting for the oven to be preheated before mixing (since the baking powder activates as soon as it hits moisture).

After he had finished with the muffins, he boiled and mashed some potatoes and mixed up the pizza crust.

When he was done in the kitchen, I put together the shortbread crust of the Lemon Bars, pressed it into a slice pan, and put it in the fridge. Then I blended up the topping in a bowl, using mango flavoured silken tofu (not noticeable over the lemony-ness) and custard powder in place of corn flour.

When it came time for dinner, we put our carefully worked-out strategies into action. Andy mixed his batter while the oven heated, then filled muffin cups with batter and jam. We topped the pizza crust, and baked the shortbread. The muffins came out looking delicious, the pizza was rolled out a little thin and fell apart while we ate, and the Lemon Bars took much longer to set than the recipe called for. But everything was really tasty, and now we’ve got treats to last us all week.

Lemon Bars

Jam-filled Oat Muffin and a Lemon Bar

We had another oven meal last night to use up a few leftovers and old veggies. Last week I made an Ethiopian-spiced tofu and vegetable stew. We blended it up and stirred through some leftover barley. This was poured into a crust. The whole lot was topped off with a mixture of mashed potato, sweet potato, garlic, miso and sunflower butter (for a cheesy flavour). I called it Ethiopian Goatherd’s Pie—because it’s not quite shepherd’s pie.

At the same time, Andy made some gourmet-style stuffed sweet potatoes. He steamed a few big chunks of sweet potato, and the hollowed out the insides. They were stuffed with a bread and corn mix flavoured with cranberry jelly and orange marmalade. This was a very yummy, Thanksgiving-flavoured side dish, and that stuffing is likely to make more appearances in our house.

And finally, because Vaala asked after my last post, I’ll share with you my recipe for pastry crust. It’s a mix of recipes and techniques from Hot Damn and Hell Yeah, Wild Morsels, and my mum. This is enough to make one standard sized crust, or six topless mini-crusts. If you need a top, double the recipe.

¾ c. sifted flour
¼ c. ice cold margarine (leave it in the freezer for 20 minutes)
1/8 tsp. salt
2 T. ice water

--Combine flour and salt in a medium bowl. Cut in margarine with a pastry cutter or your fingers, until the mixture resembles bread crumbs. Add ice water and mix well, kneading slightly to incorporate all the flour. Form into a ball (or six small balls, for cupcake-sized pies) and chill for 30 minutes. Roll out between two sheets of cling wrap to desired size. The cling wrap keeps it from drying out the way a floured surface does. When you transfer the crust to your pan, peel off the top piece of cling wrap and flip the crust into your pan, and use the other cling wrap to press it in to place. Fill with something yummy, bake and enjoy.

Brain food.

Andy and I have been working fairly hard since I’ve come back from Canberra—me on writing (I’m nearly done with a rough-as-guts draft of chapter 4!!), him on organising field trips (he’s currently at Orpheus Island and will be back in PNG at the end of March). Thus, much of our time has been spent at uni rather than at home in the kitchen. Add to this the crazy weather we’ve had. When it has rained, the highways flood in the blink of an eye, leaving us cut off from fresh fruit and veggies. When it’s not raining, it’s hot and humid. At least the bike paths are no longer too flooded to ride to uni. However, the conditions are perfect for growing mould—I’m thinking of starting some sort of commercial venture, since it grows so readily on every surface in our house, from the desktop to the outside doors to my clothes in the closet.

But unlike mould, kitchen inspiration has been a bit hard to come by this summer. Still, we have managed to come up with a few good meals...

An easy favourite, when the right ingredients are on hand, are burgers. This recipe for ‘Mexican Patties’, which we loosely followed, is from Wild Morsels and it was good. Beans, polenta, tomatoes and Mexican-inspired spices all combined into these yummy, easy to put together patties. Andy is the master of burger-assembly, and he didn’t disappoint. White bread burger buns, lettuce, tomato, beetroot and cucumber formed the base on which the patty rested. On top were onions sautéed with a few diced Spanish olives, and a generous scoop of Almost Sour Cream (from Hot Damn and Hell Yeah).

There have been a lot of nights when I haven’t felt like eating much more than a bowl of cereal, let alone cooking, so luckily there is someone else in the house to pick up the slack. Andy set out to make me a secret meal and set to flipping through recipes in the cupboard. He settled on SusanV’s mini-crustless tofu quiches. Our experience with these in the past has been tasty but structurally a mess, so he planned to add a crust. Unfortunately, we were out of frozen pastry, so the surprise was ruined and I was mustered off the couch to make pastry. It was worth the minimal effort—they turned out really well, all filled with spinach and love.

Speaking of love, who doesn’t love marked down food? Andy and I always scoop up reduced items, so when I saw the telltale green sticker on this soy cheese I got all excited. The texture is similar to the super-processed Velveeta cheese block, but a bit grainier.

I tried to dice it up to put on pizza, but it is pretty gooey and stuck to the knife. So instead I sort of crumbled it. It has a really cheddary flavour, and didn’t melt, but it made a nice addition to our usual repertoire of toppings (seitan, pineapple, tomato/bbq sauce, and parsley).

On the bright side, the first day of Autumn is in less than a week. On the not-so-bright side, that means almost nothing here in north Queensland!

Cyclone food

I got home from Canberra on Saturday afternoon, just a few hours after Cyclone Ellie formed off the coast (she had previously just been a tropical low). It started raining on Sunday and they were predicting that Ellie would cross the coast at Cardwell, about 90 minutes north of Townsville, at midday on Monday. There were lots of warnings on the radio to "ready yourselves for the cyclone", so Andy and I took stock of what we had--a camp stove we bought last cyclone season and have yet to use; batteries; two little battery powered radios that tune into the ABC with ease; lots of tinned tomatoes and spaghetti; and a few packs of gnocchi, which are quick to cook if the power goes out. We don't have much in the way of veggies, because the markets have been cancelled for weeks, and the grocery stores are unable to get new orders because the highway is flooded north, south and west of Townsville. What we did have was about three kilos of carrots.

A rainy day and cool weather (it's all relative--29 degrees feels cool in summer), plus the threat of power failure sounds, to me, like an invitation to bake. It was the perfect time, in fact, to try a few recipes from my newest cookbook, The Joy of Vegan Baking.
I made banana muffins, with crystallised ginger instead of chocolate chips. We threw a loaf of multi-grain bread into the bread maker in case of future power failure. And, to use some of the many carrots, I made a carrot cake. In place of the oil in this recipe I used mango puree, which made for a really moist, sweet carrot cake. We froze half the cake and the muffins, because 90+% humidity means things go mouldy fairly quickly here.

We haven't been eating only sweets, though, as good as that may be. We've been filling up on lots of cold weather comfort foods. This lentil loaf from Wild Morsels was the best bean-loaf recipe I've made. It was very tasty, and it actually held together in loaf shape. Instead of grated sweet potato, we used carrot and it worked just fine.

The only silly thing I did was to put a layer of tomato paste on the top, like my mum used to do with meatloaf. The baking paper I used to line the pan got soggy, so we had to flip the loaf over to slice it--and the tomato ended up on the bottom, instead of the top.

One night for dinner we had gnocchi, tossed with a hearty tomato-aniseed-roasted garlic sauce. A quick salad of our meagre vegetables filled the plate and added some variety to our diets.

This stick-to-your-ribs meal is cannellini beans, peas and carrots in a vegemite gravy, served with brown rice, cucumber and tomato.
And most recently, Andy requested that I make Urban Vegan's chickpea paprikash again. This time I put in grated carrot instead of capsicum, and served it over spaghetti instead of spaetze. The homemade noodles are definitely better, but this was still tasty and filling and just what we needed. On the side, we had leftover lentil loaf, some sourdough baguette, and a bit of fresh tomato.
Although the rain has slowed up a bit, and the wind has died down, there are still lots of flooded roads and, more importantly, flooded bike paths. We've had to drive to uni every day, which is leaving us both feeling a bit antsy. And there are two lows in the Coral Sea that are predicted to turn into cyclones in the near future, so it looks like we'll be eating too much and exercising too little for at least a bit longer...

Schnitzel-mania

One of the first recipes we've made from my new cookbook, Wild Morsels, is the Crumbed Tofu Schnitzels. By "trying this recipe" I mean following it's methods but changing up the ingredients, because our pantry was low on the required attributes to follow exactly.

So, the idea behind this recipe is to marinate tofu and then to flour it, "egg" wash it, and the crumb it before frying.

Andy made a marinade out of soy sauce, orange juice, herbs, and some other mystery ingredients. We let the tofu sit overnight to absorb maximum flavour.

I forgot that we had breadcrumbs in the freezer, so I crushed some corn flakes instead. Then we set up a bit of a production line and I got to schnitzelling.

Step 1: Coat tofu in flour.

Step 2: Dip floured tofu in batter.

Step 3: Cover floured and battered tofu in crumbs.
Step 4: Set aside. Andy reckons it's best to leave the schnitzels for at least 20 minutes, so the egg equivalent can harden up and the crumbs are less likely to fall off.
We had batter left over from the tofu, so we schnitzelled some zucchini slices as well.
After your schnitzels have rested up properly, and you've gotten all the gunky batter/crumb mix off your fingers, it's time to start frying. Heat up the pan, add a thin layer of oil and then the schnitzels. Cook until the crumbs are golden, and if necessary keep them warm in the oven while you fry the rest of the schnitzels.

We had ours served on a bed of spinach with a small salad.

And the next day, we enjoyed them cold in sandwich form.
I've never schnitzelled anything before, but this was actually much easier, and much more rewarding than I expected. (Plus, the word schnitzel is really fun to say, which is why I've made it into a verb and adjective as well as a noun.) I'll definitely be schnitzelling again in the future!