Storming the Freezer

Last night a cyclone crossed the coast. For the first part of the week, it looked like it was coming pretty much straight at Townsville. I have lived here for nearly 7 years, and while I'm not a local nor a meteorologist, I have seen several cyclones heading straight for Townsville that end up going elsewhere when push comes to shove. So we got prepared by cleaning up the back yard but didn't get too worked up. Good thing, too, because it ended up heading 200kms south of us, and we saw less than 40mm of rain at our house.

One of the things we figured out during Cyclone Yasi, which is rarely given out in official advice, is to eat anything precious from the freezer, so that if the power goes out for a few days you don't have to throw it away. So this week we had a few freezer based dinners. We still have rather a lot in there, but now there is plenty of space for a new batch of ice cream...

We tried some Fry's vegan burgers, which were good but not worth full price. They were delicious with some cherry tomatoes, cooked down with olive oil and garlic.

Here we have tofu (from the freezer) marinated with teriyaki and chilli sauce, spring rolls (from the freezer), BBQ pineapple, and fried rice with capsicum (from the freezer) and eggplant, green beans, cherry tomatoes, sweet potato shoots and baby kale (all from the garden).

When our mulberry tree gets ripe fruit on it, we pick them and stick them in a container in the freezer, till we have enough for something yummy. This container spent an overnight with some oats to become a yummy breakfast.

And for lunch I brought a chickpea naan roll to work, inspired by Joey's link to Dan Lepard's recipe - but with a slightly different filling.

None of this made a massive dent in the freezer stash - we still have about 15 naan rolls, a few boxes of Fry's, a bag of frozen capsicum, 6 blocks of tofu, and other random things. But if any more cyclones form in the coming months, at least we've made a start!

Vegan Carbonara

As I promised at the very end of last year, I have made another batch of Carbonara so I can post the recipe here.

Carbonara is one of those dishes that a lot of people seem to love, but I had never even heard of before I went vegan. So I have no reference point to compare it to. But somewhere along the way I picked up the key ingredients - egg yolks, bacon, cream and pasta. Not super vegan friendly? Think again.

We had some Vegg in the freezer (we blend up the whole packet and freeze in smaller jars), and some imitation bacon bits (fully vegan) that my mum sent over as a birthday present. So the food miles for this are not small! It's not an every week kind of meal, but it is easy, and fast, filling, and really delicious. And unlike chicken's eggs, the Vegg won't "scramble" if you leave it on the heat for too long, so there is less multi-tasking with the vegan version of Carbonara.

Vegan Carbonara

1 Tbsp. olive or coconut oil
3 cloves of garlic, minced
300 grams of mushrooms, thickly sliced
1 Tbsp. vegan bacon bits
1/2 c. prepared Vegg
100 mL coconut cream, soy milk or other non-dairy substitute
400 grams of pasta
parsley, salt and pepper, nutritional yeast, and more bacon bits for sprinkling

Heat the oil in a frying pan over pretty high (not quite the highest) heat. Saute the mushrooms until they are soft and the liquid has evaporated from them. The high heat helps evaporation to happen faster, so your mushrooms brown instead of boiling in their weird mushroom water. Stir in the garlic and bacon bits and mix it all around for a minute. Add Vegg and soy milk and turn the heat to low and leave it, stirring every now and then, while your pasta cooks. Boil water (boiling in the kettle is more efficient than the stove, I hear), cook spaghetti or other pasta until it is al dente, or mushy if that's your thing. Drain, dump it into the pan with the sauce, and stir it all up. If it's a bit claggy, throw in some more soy milk. It should be creamy and saucy and good. Season with salt and pepper to taste, and serve with parsley, nutritional yeast, and moar bacon bits.

It's worthing getting some Vegg for this - which reminds me, I need to order some more. I honestly will probably never attempt a vegan poached egg again, but Vegg makes a rocking carbonara.

In Hobart

This was our first trip to Tasmania, and we'd been pretty busy throughout the year and didn't really have as much time to plan as we probably needed. So we sort of decided to just wing it - see what we came across in Hobart, hire a car while we were there if we felt like it. This is a good relaxing way to travel, but in hindsight it would have been worth hiring a car straight from the airport and driving around a bit more.

We spent a few days poking around Hobart, though, which was fun in a slow way. The city feels very British, and in a lot of ways looks like New England. There were flowers everywhere, which made me sniffle and sneeze in a way that tropical plants do not.

The garden at our apartment.

Our first goal, when we arrived on Friday around lunch time, was to find some food. I had familiarised myself with Where's the Beef's Hobart posts, and wrote down lots of places we might go. Luckily the Hobart city centre is really quite compact, so we didn't need to spend hours walking around before we came upon Mo Mo Bubble Tea and Coffee House. Of course we got bubble tea - Andy a mulberry tea and me an apple tea, with pearls to fill us up.

But despite the extensive list of tea choices, I was most impressed with the burgers. I had a vegan fish burger.

It was amazingly flaky and tasted a lot like tuna salad, in a pleasant way.

Andy had a chicken schnitzel burger, which he liked a whole lot better than his chicken burger from Lord of the Fries.

After that we sought out the waterfront, and then found a grocery store. Since it was cold, and since we were in an apartment with a kitchen, we figured we would eat lunch out most days but have breakfast and dinner at home. I think I'll do a separate post about our self-catering efforts. 

Saturday morning we made the obligatory visit to Salamanca Markets. We were a bit unsure what to expect - some people said they were overrated, others said they're fantastic. We really liked the markets. We spent a good few hours wandering through the stalls looking at the wares on offer, tasting samples of olives and jams wherever we could, and basking in the warm-ish sun.

I got a pie for lunch from the Summer Kitchen Bakery stall - a lentil shepherd's pie. It came with chutney, and I liked it well enough. I've had few occasions in my life to eat a takeaway pie like this so it was a bit of an experience.

We wandered around some more, looking at things like boats.

And on our walk back to our apartment in North Hobart, we passed a vet clinic with the most adorable exterior painting job.

Sunday we headed out to another market, this one focused on produce. The Farm Gate Market was a little smaller than I expected, but full of potatoes and broad beans and Asian greens. There was a burrito stall that sold vegan burritoes, and a cake stall that sold a vegan muesli slice, but we were there early and had just eaten breakfast so we didn't sample any of these offerings.

More wandering around Hobart had us marveling at how vibrantly green everything was.

Then we happened upon a designer's market full of beautiful wood working, glass, paintings, and other works of art. And a pastry stall. I got a potato and red lentil samosa, and Andy had a kale and pumpkin pie.

And then a little bit more wandering and we discovered there was a free shuttle bus out to the Cascade Brewery, in honour of some birthday or other. There wasn't really much information around, but we each got a token for a 50cent beer, so we sat on the lawn and listened to jazz and took it pretty easy for the afternoon.

On Monday we went to the botanical gardens. My camera batteries were flat, and also I wanted to die from all the sneezing and hay fevering, so I have no photos. But they were the best botanical gardens Andy or I have visited. Lots of variety, and it was a warm sunny day, so we enjoyed ourselves even though Pete's Patch, our main attraction, was under construction. We had lunch at Dumpling World, which was all right.

The next few days we drove, getting out of Hobart to see what else was around. As beautiful as it was, Hobart city was perhaps a wee bit boring, but a great way to spend a relaxing week.

We've got fever, for Betty Beaver

When I was growing up, we lived about 25 minutes from a petrol station which had a sort of three dimensional sign featuring a massively-busty beaver in a very short, American-flag dress. I was just thinking how much I wish I could share a photo, and lo! Google to the rescue!

Check it: http://aesthetic.gregcookland.com/2007_08_19_archive.html

I mainly saw Betty Beaver when I was on the bus to sporting events (as the team manager, because I was definitely not willing to actually participate in actual sports!). We sang a song whenever we saw her:

We've got the fever, for Betty Beaver... Big teeth; big boobs; Betty Beaver's got the moves! Gooooo Betty.

I was, obviously, pretty cool.

Also when I was growing up, my mum had a food-splattered, red & white checker covered Betty Crocker cookbook. It lived permanently on the counter, and we all referred to it fairly regularly.

This Christmas, I was gifted a cash card that could only be spent in the US. I took the opportunity a few weeks ago to order some cookbooks from Amazon. I got two very healthy cookbooks: The Happy Herbivore and Let them eat vegan! Both are proudly low in fat and sugar, and actively avoid mock meats and things like wheat. The third cookbook I ordered is sort of the opposite, in all the best ways - Betty Goes Vegan by Annie & Dan Shannon.

I made my first recipe tonight for dinner

 

This is "Herb-Roasted Chicken and Vegetables", from p. 143. I used Fry's Vegetarian Chicken Strips, my first go at this frozen mock meat. I did make some substitutions - I used balsamic instead of lemon, I used sweet potato instead of white potato, and green peas instead of green beans. So, maybe I didn't really make this recipe, but in any case, it was fantastic.
So far, Betty Goes Vegan's definitely got the moves. Go Betty!

Meal Planning: Week 2

Look at me: back at work for less than a month and I've already fallen off the regular-blogging wagon. Obviously I'm no good at multi-tasking, so you can see why I need at least a semi-structured meal plan!

Our second week of meal-planning began with the best of intentions. We would go to the market, get whatever produce looked good and was cheap, and then plan a week's worth of meals. But on Sunday morning we woke to find Tika in a bit of discomfort and sporting a huge belly. The night before, I left the dog food bag open, and she helped herself. So we skipped the market, instead staying home to keep an eye on her (also, it was hot).

So I thought about what we had on hand, and started flicking through some cookbooks, but I only got through two before I had so many ideas. Week 2's meal plan became our Week of Urban Vegan. Her cookbooks tend to be my faves anyways, so I wasn't surprised to find a big list of possibilities. Here is the plan that I wrote, based on some input (and some resistance) from Andy:

• Esther's Baked Falafel (Celebrate Vegan p.107), or Chickpea Chilli Burgers (Urban Vegan, p.48) - early in the week, so Andy could have leftovers on his lunch-time sandwiches
• Black Bean and Bulgur Tacos (UV, p.83) - on Tuesday or Wednesday, so the lettuce was still fresh.
• Pumpkin risotto with sage and sundried tomatoes (UV, p.152)
• Spicy Seitan 'Wings' (Celebrate, p.165)
• Spaghetti alle Melanzane (UV, p.91)
• Pumpkin-Daal Soup (UV, p.54)

There were others I could have chosen, but there are only so many days in a week! At this point, Andy got a little nervous that my meal-planning would become inflexible, so we agreed that this was just a guide - a list of recipes that we could use if we didn't know what to make, but if we felt inspired to do something else that was cool too.

Here is how it turned out.

On Sunday, while soaking beans for the week, I decided to turn some overripe bananas into muffins. I used the recipe for Blueberry-Banana Bread (UV, p.24) as a guide, but changed it up heaps, so I will post the new recipe another time. These were high in protein, and super yummy, the perfect morning tea snack for a week without fruit (on account of not going to the markets).

Sunday night's dinner was a mash-up of the two chickpea patty recipes. I couldn't decide, and then I did, but then I changed my mind. So the flavouring is falafel, but I added oats as per the burger recipe to bulk the patties up. They were a little dry, so not very well suited to BBQing, but they were delicious with BBQ potatoes, beetroot and corn.

Monday night we had eggplant pasta, basically following the recipe for "alle Melanzane" but adding a jar of pesto (because our freezer is so full of it!), and using penne pasta.

Up until now, our meals for Week 2 looked strikingly similar to Week 1, with a few minor variations. Andy would have preferred to keep this up, but Tuesday is where I took a more serious detour. Instead of our normal tomatoey Mexican meals, I made Dynise's Black Bean and Bulgur filling, with the addition of some corn, which we ate burrito-style. I thought they were delicious, and a great change. Andy likes what he likes, and thought these were just okay.

On Wednesday, we got a break from the sticky, hot weather - instead, it was 25 degrees and we got 200mm of rain. I felt like something warm and snuggly, so flicked through the two cookbooks and decided to make an afternoon snack of Milk Pudding (Halvaye Shir), a Persian sweet (Celebrate, p.10). Except I didn't follow the recipe well - I used different spices, vanilla instead of rosewater, and walnuts instead of pistachios. It was very yummy, anyways.

Then for dinner, we went off-plan in favour of something hearty and warm - Mesir Wat with Chappatis.

Thursday was still a little on the cool side, so rather than BBQ-ising Dynise's seitan wing recipe, we followed the original recipe and baked them in the oven. I think of them as nuggets, more so than wings, but whatever you call them they are fantastic (with oven-baked potatoes).

On Friday, we fell into old habits (not necessarily bad habits...) and threw some gnocchi and jarred tomato sauce together and called it dinner. It did the job, got us through the week, and made a dent in the big pile of gnocchi taking up space in our freezer. So Week 2 was a little similar to Week 1, a little creative, and still flexible. A success, even if not a resounding one!

Vegan Bacon Cheeseburger

Last week I was browsing one of my favourite quirky-lifestyle blogs, Offbeat Home & Life, and was stoked to see this guest post by The Sweetest Vegan about a vegan bacon cheeseburger. I pinned it and facebook shared it, partially to let the Offbeat blog admin people know the post was a good one, but also because - OMG vegan bacon cheeseburger! Sure, I make vegan burgers all the time. I make vegan cheese semi-regularly. And vegan bacon recipes are plentiful. But this recipe was straightforward, and it put all the components together. 

Filed away in the back of my mind, the recipe made its way back to the front on Monday night when I saw this post by Tara. On Tuesday, I decided I just had to make it. I am still on holidays, you see, while Andy is back at work, so I have been getting lost in complicated recipes this week. 

Not that this recipe is complicated, but it was a mammoth effort in multi-tasking (it would be less so if you used canned beans). First I put black beans and white beans on to soak while I went out to grab the few ingredients I didn't have on hand - sweet potato (though I could have probably dug some from the garden), coconut flakes, and bread rolls.

When I got home, I put the first batch of beans into the pressure cooker. Then I peeled my sweet potato (and cooked the peels in the oven for a crunchy snack for Tika), and put it in boiling water to cook.

 I mixed up the marinade for the coconut bacon and put it all in a bowl to soak up the flavours.

When the black beans were done, I put the white ones on to cook while I made the burger patties: mashing together the beans and sweet potato, but leaving out garlic powder (we can't keep it in our humidity), sriracha (we don't have), and onion (I don't love). I had about 1 cup of beans leftover, and 1/4 cup of sweet potato, so I threw them in too, and then folded through the oats. This I set aside while I got on with other things.

I put the coconut bacon in the oven to crisp up. I had it in there for nearly half an hour and it didn't crisp, so I  took it out in case the crisping happened as it cooled. It never did, but oh well.

While the coconut bacon was bakin', I put the cheese together. This is a great recipe, because it doesn't require cooking. I cut the recipe in half, because I only had half a cup of nutritional yeast, and we still have about 4 times as much cheese as we needed. 

I formed my patties and put them in the fridge to chill out, and then it was time for me to chill out myself. Less than an hour and a half in the kitchen and I had cooked two batches of beans from scratch and turned them into the vital components for a vegan bacon cheeseburger. 

The only thing left to do was cook the patties, but instead of putting them in the oven I did them on the BBQ, because we have one, and it's summer.

On the Weber with some okra and a tiny eggplant. 

And because, check out those grill marks. 

Then I put it all together. A bit of mayo on the top of the bun, and some cheese on the bottom. Then lettuce, a burger, some more cheese, some bacon. Andy added tomato sauce, but I didn't think it needed it.

This is a great recipe - aside from a few exceptions, the ingredients are easy to find in most pantries. Aside from some soy sauce, all three components are soy free - no tofu or soy milk here. They also lend themselves to being gluten free, if you used gluten free oats, or subbed in something like quinoa flakes. For vegan junk food, there isn't really too much that is actually unhealthy about any of the meal. And, holy pants it was yummy. 

Eating All The Food

Or, The Great Brisbane Vegustation

I spent the last 5 days in Brisbane for a conference. My time in Brisbane began on Tuesday morning, catching up with a friend from undergrad, with a samosa and a rhubarb-apple crumble from Vege Rama in Myer Centre. It was much, much better than the conference food. But the obvious highlight of the trip was Saturday, which I spent with Susan, eating for about 8 solid hours.

Susan, clearly a woman after my own heart, is a planner - and had a rough itinerary of the best way to get the best of Brisbane's vegan offerings. Plus looking at pretty dresses and shoes. Here is allll the food we ate...

The day started at West End Markets, where we beelined to the ykillamoocow stall for vegan dagwood dogs.

While they were cooking up, we popped across to the fresh sugar cane juice stall. We both got our sugar cane juice with ginger and lime, and it was fantastic.

We had a little walk along the Brisbane River before heading to Paddington, where Green Edge is located. Green Edge is a vegan grocery store cross cafe. We met up with Amy for lunch (for her) and lemon cheesecake (for us).

And milkshakes. Unfortunately they were out of cookies, so my first choice Cookies&Cream milkshake was changed to chocolate, but I can't really complain because it was delicious.

From Green Edge, we went to Fortitude Valley and dropped in to Kuan Yin Tea House. This is where we overdid it a little. The real reason for being there was for Taro Milk Bubble Tea.

But since we were there we also got some Spicy Calamari.

Lots of batter, funny chewy calamari. Covered in plum salt, which was yum!

And Fried Dumplings.

We couldn't actually finish the dumplings because we were both starting to feel a little bit sick. But I took them away in a container and ate them later on, in the airport! The culprit was, most likely, the tapioca bubbles, though several versions of fried food certainly didn't help. So we walked through some shops in the Valley, clutching our food babies as we looked at Melissa shoes and tried on gorgeous dresses (a size bigger than usual, perhaps?).

We must have successfully walked off that feeling of I'm going to die if I eat another bite because we stopped at 5 Dogs and ordered a vegan hot dog to share, with saurkraut, vegan cheese, ketchup and mustard. This we took to New Farm Park where we ate overlooking the river, and about 5 different couples posing for wedding photos.

After sitting and digesting for a bit longer, we made our way to Loving Hut in Mt Gravatt. This was my first time at any Loving Hut, so it was pretty exciting to watch the Supreme Master talk about how she tried to save the people who used to live on Venus from destroying their planet. (Alas, she was unsuccessful.) Susan recommended three of her favourite dishes on the menu, but I decided to go with the Garlic Butter Cutlets, because I felt like European food, and she said a lot of people rave about them. We both ordered them, and were both pretty disappointed. They were salty, and oily (which shouldn't have been a surprise, really), but at least they came with a big pile of veggies and couscous.

I let some butter melt on the cutlets but about 80% was put to the side, and it was still too greasy.

After 5 courses, I left Brisbane feeling fully satisfied, happy to have made up for a few hungry days of conferencing. In hindsight, less fried food and less mock meat may have enabled us to eat much more, but I think we put in a pretty good effort!

The Vegg! Smoked Cheddar Sheese. BBQ tofu jerky (from an Asian grocery, not from Green Edge).
Primal Strips. White Chocolate.

The food didn't stop in Brisbane, though - I stocked up on a few things at the Green Edge.