Produce - Big and Little

Andy and I have big appetites, so we love our veggies in giant proportions. Our favourite winter veggie in the garden is kale. It's getting to the time of year now that they are full of caterpillars. Andy is still happy to eat them, but I get a little grossed out at the idea. And on the weekend Andy cooked one, and it ended up in my bowl. That put my off my pasta.

But caterpillars aside, we prefer our kale to come in mountains, rather than the tiddly bunches you get in supermarkets.

Kale mountain.

Kale with cauliflower, jacket potatoes and corn cooked on the BBQ, and a tomato and cucumber salad

And when choosing a sweet potato at the market last week, Andy chose this gigantor. That's 2.4 kilos, or 5 pounds, of a single sweet potato.

Sweet potato chips with black bean burgers (recipe from Celebrate Vegan)

But sometimes we don't have as much success. We tried to grow a row of carrots, and they were pretty puny.

Tiddly carrots. We roasted them with Aloo Palak Pie.

And our corn grew really quickly and looked great, but was very small. Tasty, but tiny.

Not done yet. 

BBQ corn with pumpkin, potatoes and carrot, and Chickpea Pumpkin Seed Burgers (recipe from Let them eat vegan!)

The corn and carrots do prove that sometimes the smallest produce are the sweetest and tenderest. But we still love giants.

Quick meals.

To prove that I do eat vegetables, here are two post-moving meals that we scraped together despite our diminished pantry. Both quick to prepare, with minimal hands-on cooking time. This is both a good and a bad thing - I love cooking, and love eating food that has been lovingly prepared. But, Andy and I are increasingly busy at work, and with a house and garden to spend time on as well, quick & easy meals become a necessity. That they are still healthy is the positive thing to focus on, I guess! (Incidentally, both of these meals are gluten free, and soy free.)


First, a pressure cooker risotto. This time it worked beautifully - we used a red onion, and a bit of balsamic vinegar, which gave the rice a pleasantly pink hue. The risotto also had butternut pumpkin, broccoli, and aniseed. It was very delicious.

The second meal is an improv ful salad. Ful is a dish made from fava beans, with the consistency of refried beans. When I was in Ethiopia, we ate ful for breakfast, straight up in a bowl, topped with chilli and tomato, with crusty bread. We had this from our favourite cafe, called Yeshi Buna, one of the many places in Ethiopia where they roast, grind, and brew coffee beans all in the middle of the restaurant. The smell, as you can imagine, was pretty amazing. When I returned home from Ethiopia, I posted the recipe for ful onto VegWeb. Last year, I googled the recipe and found that it had been copied, verbatim, to several places on the internet. Including my commentary about Yeshi Buna. At first I was a bit stroppy that I wasn't attributed, but now I'm a bit meh about it all - it's the internets, afterall. Anyways, we still make ful the same way, except with cooked beans instead of tinned. It's as delicious as I remember. This day, though, we didn't have any bread of any kind, so we served on lettuce, and topped with avocado & cucumber. It was still delicious.

Kitty paws not recommended as a side dish.

What are your healthy but quick go-to meals?

Some more things to do with mango

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.

PNG Eats

On my recent trip to PNG, I ate lots and lots of food.  Even though the snorkelling was by no means strenuous (and only for a few hours a day) I snacked like crazy.  And, given the availability of food in the shops and the market over there, things were pretty carb-heavy.  In other words, I was kind of in heaven.

There was no soy milk around, and since it was a short trip I didn't bother worrying about it. (When I went before, for two months, I brought up some powder which was gross, but then found some asceptic soymilks from Vietnam for sale in the store.)  Breakfast, then, consisted of toast or oats.  Both with lots of bananas.

Most days we went diving at 11 or so, and had a big mid-morning snack before going.  Avocado toast, anyone?

Lunch was either two-minute noodles or sandwiches.  Then for an afternoon snack I often had Ryvitas with peanut butter, or with vegemite.

We got through a few chocolate cakes for afternoon and evening snackage.

And we cooked dinner every night, except for one when we went over to the resort for a rather disappointing meal.  Our kitchen was a bit small, and the stove, pans and utensils weren't wonderful, but we managed to produce a few good meals (and a few mediocre ones).

The first night, Andy cooked up a bunch of pasta with a tomatoey-sweet potatoey-olivey sauce.  It was an interesting combination - the flavours were good but the texture of sweet potato with pasta was a little funny.  (The photos of our dinners were hard to get, because it was so dark by 6pm and the lights in the house were not great, so apologies for the fuzziness.)

I had brought the recipe for Jamaican Cook Up Rice from The Tropical Vegan, so we made that with some changes.  We didn't have any fresh herbs, and barely any spices, but this coconutty rice & black eyed peas was good anyways.  The pumpkin greens we stirred through were a winner; the sweet potato had gone off and made me want to gag.  We picked it out and somehow managed to enjoy the meal anyways (being in PNG makes me a lot less precious about that sort of thing).

We had two noodle stir-fries.  One, with a packet of Ma Po sauce, made our mouths tingle in a chemically way.  Another was much better, made with simply sweet chilli and soy sauce, with eggplant, pumpkin and a green that looked like watercress.

The rice in PNG is good.

Especially with a yummy chickpea stew on top.  This was coconut milk, tomatoes, and curry powder and was surprisingly good.  On the side we had a giant salad, and some more pumpkin greens sauteed in liquid seasoning.

And we found a new favourite food in plantains.  We tried two varieties while we were over there - kiau kiau were skinny like regular bananas, and there was a fatter, starchier variety as well.  I fried them up, tostone style.  One night we had them with refried beans & corn.

Another night they went with a veggie & black eyed pea stew on rice (and a chocolate cake cooling in the background).

All up, we ate pretty well.  I'll be back soon to show you some of the activities I spent all those calories on...

Nom.

More recent meals. We seem to be eating really well lately, with new recipes that are a hit and old favourites that turn out well, so I am collecting a backlog of photos. So I'll just put them up here without too much word-age from me...

Falafels (made from a just-add-water packet) with avocado. Bulgur salad with lemon juice, raw corn, loads of parsley, cucumber and green capsicum. And sesame-soy green beans and asparagus.

Mexican lasanga (aka "deconstructed enchiladas")--a mexican-ish sweet potato and bean mixture layered between tortillas and baked. Smashed potatoes, which didn't work out perfectly but were still yummy, method stolen from BrisVegan. Roasted garlicky green beans. And avocado-coriander salsa.
Twice baked potatoes. The filling is blended up potato and chickpeas with roasted nori, sauteed onion and spinach. Roasted garlicky green beans with cherry tomatoes. And in the back a salad of leafy lettuce, avocado, and raw corn. You can also see Andy impatiently stabbing away at a cherry tomato as I take my photo.

From La Dolce Vegan, 'Stuffed Cabbage Rolls'. I mostly followed this recipe, but subbed seitan for the mushrooms and sunflower seeds for the walnuts. Also, I doubled the recipe because Andy and I have huge appetites. These were really freaking good. The cumin-orange glazed sweet potatoes we served them with were only okay. Look at the steam!
During a seitan-making extravaganza, Andy wiped his hands on his bum, leaving floury fingerprints all over his boardies that I thought were cute...
For dessert one night I whipped up a half-recipe of Vegetation's mother-in-law's self-saucing choc pudding. This was the perfect amount for the two of us and the saucy chocolately goodness was the perfect end to a meal.
While we keep warm with oven food, Nacho keeps warm by napping next to the fishtank light. This sleep-spot has an added bonus--no need to go anywhere if she gets thirsty.

Winter dinners

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gnocchi two ways.

A quick dinner we have every now and then is gnocchi. I’ve never tried to make my own, although I’d like to, some time. This is the “quick and nasty” store bought kind—which is actually not that nasty, but rather chewy and carby and delicious.

We usually just cook gnocchi the usual way—boil it for a minute and then cover with sauce. This sauce was really good, and a labour of love. Our basil plants were clearly dying, so Andy picked off the last of the usable leaves. I got the mortar and pestle from the cupboard and pounded the basil leaves with some garlic, sunflower seeds, salt and pepper, and nutritional yeast. Once it was mostly smooth, I mixed it into some crushed tomatoes for a cheesy, basilly sauce.

Served up with a big ol’ salad, full of sprouts, raw corn, tomatoes, avocado, tofu fetta (from the Uncheese cookbook), cucumber, and lettuce from a friend’s garden, this was a well-rounded meal.

Recently, however, I have become switched on to the phenomenon of fried gnocchi. Instead of boiling, they get cooked in a skillet with some oil and whatever veggies are on hand.

In this case, I combined the gnocchi with some chopped green olives and garlic. Then at the last minute I stirred through some balsamic vinegar, which kind of caramelised in a yummy way.

Boiled gnocchi are light and fluffy and fantastic, while fried gnocchi are chewy and hearty, but either way they are really good.