Vegan Christmas

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!

Noodles. Oodles of them.

When I was a kid there was a poem that me and my sister *loved*.  I can't remember exactly how it goes; I've found this version by googling but something tells me it's not quite right - for one thing, I'm fairly certain our noodles poem was much longer.

I love noodles. Give me oodles.
Make a mound up to the sun.
Noodles are my favorite foodles.
I eat noodles by the ton. 

Whether or not that is the right poem, the point is that I have always loved noodles.  2-minute noodles, Top Ramen, whatever they are called in your neck of the woods -- we ate them for lunch every weekend and referred to them as "oodles of noodles".  As in, "I'm going to make some oodles of noodles, do you want some?"  Only I can't remember sharing, so that sentence may be wrong.

Although I avoid the heavily processed 2-minute noodles these days, I still love a good noodly meal.

This one is mung bean vermicelli, with shredded carrot and sweet potato (side note: if you haven't tried raw grated sweet potato in salads yet, what are you waiting for?!), green peas, some peanuts, and an asian-ish dressing of soy sauce and sesame oil and sweet chilli.  Yummy but still healthy, and a good weekend lunch.

Slightly less healthy, this is lemon-pepper seitan with a coconut cream sauce.  Some ceylon spinach added some greenery, and mixing this with noodles made it so morish.

And in the more stereotypical range, a veggie stirfry with peanut sauce.  I love peanut sauce so much, and this needed more!

Whenever we eat noodles, Andy tries to make sure I get enough veggies, or seitan, or whatever else is in the meal alongside the noodles -- I think that he thinks he's doing me a favour.  But really, if my bowl was 90% noodles, I would be happy with that.

Ginger, Lime, and Tahini?

In my testing for Carla's One Dish Wonders cookbook, I have seen a few recipes that I look at, read the ingredients list, and think, "Really?"  But I've tried a few of those recipes, despite my scepticism, and have been pleasantly surprised.

Case in point: Lime, ginger and tahini sauce.  Lime and ginger together makes sense to me.  But adding tahini into the mix just sounded like crazy talk.  But Andy and I felt like a stir fry, and we had all the ingredients, so we gave it a go.  And I'm glad I did - the ingredients come together in a magical way that makes it taste like peanut sauce, but also not like peanut sauce.  It's tangy and zippy and tart and morish.  And the other ingredients cover up the chalky taste that tahini often leaves in my mouth when I eat it (yeah, I don't *love* tahini, shock!).

On its own, it was a little thick for our stir frying needs - so we added a bit of ginger beer to thin it out (and for an excuse to drink the rest of the bottle) and mixed it through our noodles and veggies.

Another great recipe from One Dish Wonders!

Summer, summer, summertime.

In my head, I am singing the song from the opening of Saved by the Bell: Hawaiian Style, just to give you a glimpse of how strange I am.

But I really am going to talk about summer.  As you may be aware, Andy and I are kind of, um, obsessed with mango season.  This year we mainly missed out, though, which was terribly disappointing.  The first Bowen mangoes were for sale the day before Andy left for PNG.  I was still home for a week, so we bought a tray.  Of course, they didn't ripen until just before I left, so I put them in the dehydrator and they turned out well, and we were looking forward to getting lots more mangoes when we came home and stockpiling dried mango.

Then we came home.  We went to the market, and got a big bucket of Bowen mangoes for $8.  We dried some, but also ate lots.  For other aussies, these are sold as Kensington Pride outside of North Queensland, and they are one of the best varieties of mango around, I think.  That week, as we chowed down on our bucket of mangoes, we got loads of rain.  When we got to the market the following Sunday, empty bucket just waiting to be filled, there was not one Bowen mango in sight.  What?!  We asked a few growers and they said the crop had been lost in the weather.  So we got some nam doc mai mangoes instead.  And that was the end of Bowen mango season.  1 tray, 1 bucket - a pretty pathetic year, compared to our usual effort!

However, this post isn't just a whinge about our lack of mangoes.  We did try a new (to us) asian variety.  I can't remember the name, which is an indication of how memorable it was.  They took almost two weeks to ripen, and even then they were only semi ripe.  Whether they were picked too early, or that's just how that variety of mangoes is, it was not good.  But as the saying goes, when life hands you green mangoes, make green mango salad.

That's what we did.  With peanuts, and a sweet-lime-soy dressing, and cucumber and shredded carrot, and kaffir lime leaves and lemon myrtle.  It was really yummy, actually.  And we had it with a mixture of peanut noodles + zoodles (zucchini shredded into noodle-ish strips).  It was a good summery meal.  It's just a shame it was one of the only mango meals we got all year.

The cure of my ancestors.

I mentioned in my last post about my trip to PNG that I came back and caught a cold.  This was an almost immediate thing - I travelled home on Wednesday (alllllll day, leaving at 6.10 am and getting home at 10pm, all in the same time zone), and somewhere in the epic day of travel I started getting a headache.  The next morning I woke up with a sore throat, which soon turned into a sniffly-snuffly nose.  Only, I had to come in to uni on that Thursday and Friday, because I promised my students I would be available before their essays were due, that Friday night.  Would you believe that, despite the frantic emails I received the whole time I was away, not one of them came to my office?

I suspect that my illness may have stemmed from a 6 hour hike up a volcano in the rain, whereby I got completely drenched.  It was probably not helped by 16 hours spent in planes and airports.  Whatever caused it, I felt shitty.  I grew up using the middle class white cure for everything:

Red Man's Greed
Tags: SOUTH
PARKmore...

And, despite not having eaten Campbell's chicken noodle soup in something like 7 years, and despite being grossed about by it even when I did eat it, that is what I felt like on the worst day of this cold.  So, I came home from uni ridiculously early and set about making some soup which approximated the salty, yellow-ish stuff.

I made stock out of Massel chicken-style stock, some dijon mustard, oil (I remember Campbell's being pretty fatty), a bit of miso, and some turmeric for that bright yellow quality that sticks in my head.  I mixed 1/4 c. of gluten with 1/4 c. of water and broke off tiny chunks to replicate the icky-chewy chicken-ish bits.  I also added some chilli, and whole cloves of garlic, which is by no means authentic to the tinned stuff but sure is good for a cold.  Then I let the whole thing simmer away for about an hour, while I read a magazine.  Then I broke up some noodles from the asian grocery store, so they were about 1inch long, and put those in and let it cook till they were quite soft.  The result was surprisingly delicious.  I don't know how closely it resembles its inspiration, but it sure did make me feel better.

I made a lot, so when Andy came home a few days later and proceeded to catch the cold from me, I was able to heat up some soup and serve with freshly baked corn muffins.  I don't think he had the same memories attached to the tinned condensed soup, but he liked it anyways.

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...

It's not really soup weather, but I still eat soup.

Sometimes you just feel like soupy noodles, ya know?

One weekend I was flicking through The Conscious Cook, an extremely under-utilised cookbook in my house.  I saw the Lemongrass Bisque and was taken with the idea of a clear lemony broth, and decided to make a similar soup for lunch.  I followed the broth recipe almost exactly, except that I used Lemon Myrtle, a recent score from Dee & BoaB's garden, in place of lemongrass.  And instead of making wontons to go in the soup, I made a bit of a noodle bowl.

Noodles, yuba sticks, capsicum and dried mushrooms went really well with the broth for a slurpy, soupy lunch.

Sydney Vegan: Friday Lunch

Since we got in to Sydney so late on Thursday night, Andy and I planned ahead and brought some food down with us. And we had cereal in our room for breakfast on Friday morning, so our first meal out was lunch on Friday. We went to probably the best vegan place in Sydney:
Just kidding (I am so hilarious). We did not go there, but we did try to get into the Imax to see Avatar on Friday only to find it was sold out. Where we did eat was described to me several years ago as the best vegan place in Australia: Mother Chu's Vegetarian Kitchen.

We were a little overwhelmed by the menu -- pages and pages to choose from is hard to handle when you are used to a small handful of veganisable menu items. We finally decided on Tempura with Salad...

...and Fried Noodles with Vegetables and Gluten (I think that's what it was called).

Both were good, but not great. The food was hot, fresh, and flavourful, but I've had better vegan asian food. It is highly likely that we chose two dishes that were underwhelming, as there were so very many choices. We both agreed that this was good food, but nothing super special. However, I appreciated it more than a standard Asian restaurant for the sheer volume of choices on offer.

Why Urban Vegan rocks my world

Okay, there are a lot of vegan cookbooks around. A lot of them are good, some are great. Urban Vegan’s upcoming cookbook, Urban Vegan: 250 Street Smart and Animal Free Recipes is a great one. I’ve tested 16 recipes, and I really wish I had my own kitchen—or at least some proper utensils and basic ingredients. But alas, I’m stuck in a college kitchen in which each resident is allocated exactly one cabinet and one refrigerator drawer—and expected to supply all of their own pots, pans, cutlery, plates, bowls, cooking/prep utensils, and food. And since I’m only here for three weeks, I’m eating pretty basically (I’ll tell you more about that in a future post).

So for now, I’ll just have to reminisce about the yummy Urban Vegan eats I have tried recently.

Like this deliciously thick and creamy chickpea paprikash.

Served with a bowl of chewy homemade spatzle (not a tester recipe and fairly ugly but yum!).

And finally, coconut-orange bars—a variation on coconut-lime bars. Crunchy, nutty base topped with sweet chewy slice.

With the cookbook deadline looming, I hope I can squeeze in a few more tests when I get back to Townsville!

December and January meals...

In the midst of travelling, holidays, and mango season, I have been cooking and eating at home. I just haven’t posted about it. But I’m heading off this weekend to Canberra for a three week visit to do research in the archives, do some field work (tent embassy on Invasion Day!) and get some writing done. Thus, I feel like I should get caught up a little while I still (vaguely) remember what these photos are showing!

Creamy pumpkin spaghetti. The sauce is so simple, and easy to mix up. This one has mushrooms, onion and spinach. Then mashed spinach and soymilk were mixed in to make it a sauce, and some herbs and seasonings.

One slice of a yummy pizza. My half had mashed and herbed silken tofu, seitan, olives, fresh tomato and “tropical spinach”. Andy’s half had all that plus BBQ sauce. This piece was near the centre, so you can see the dividing line between the two halves.

This is not a great photo, but it was a pretty great dinner. We found cauliflower for pretty cheap a few weeks ago and wanted to recreate our cheesy cauliflower casserole—without using the oven. So I followed the recipe from The Ultimate Uncheese Cookbook for ‘Cheez Please Soup’, leaving out some of the extra liquid. I also added some nut butter and miso to make it a bit tangier, since I found it was a bit bland. Then, after the sauce was blended smooth, I added some cauliflower and let it all simmer until the cauli was tender.

On the side, I sautéed some garlic with “tropical spinach”, grated carrot and soy sauce. We picked up a giant bunch of this greenery from the market for $2, thinking it was a great deal. Well, let me tell you—it’s not. “Tropical spinach” must be the term for tough leaves on inedible stalks. We had to pull all the leaves off the stems, and they stayed chewy and stringy after cooking. $2 not well spent.

I used the rest of the cauliflower (we got a pretty big bunch!) to test a recipe for Urban Vegan's upcoming cookbook--Gobhi Aloo. More cauliflower than potato, deliciously spiced and healthy!

This is a pad thai-style stir fry with rice noodles, carrot, zucchini, tofu and tomato. Always yummy.

And finally, the only actual January meal of the bunch, and a joint effort. Andy made potato pancakes, below the olives. I made a tabouleh-style millet salad. We collectively made some falafels (not from scratch, but a just-add-water mix), on top of the millet. And we collectively sautéed some onions, mushrooms, and broccoli. A very filling, very yummy dinner.

I’ve got a few more catch-up posts coming your way!

Oodles.

Noodles are a quick and easy foundation for a meal, which can be done without turning on the oven and hotting up the house, or even much time standing over the stove. Here are three ways we’ve had noodles recently.

This is a quick stir fry of onion, zucchini, green capsicum, mushroom spinach, and corn mixed with rice noodles. These noodles are soaked in boiling water for 3 minutes and then drained and they’re ready to go, so they’re a great ingredient when you want food fast. The flavour in this stir fry comes from chilli and some leftover sunflower-miso salad dressing.

This is an adapted version of the ‘Green Bean, Asparagus and Tofu Stir Fry over Couscous’. The main change, obviously, is that I subbed more rice noodles for the couscous. I also added black sesame seeds for pizzazz. This was a really yummy way to use some fresh, springy asparagus.

Finally, the quickest kind of noodles yet. I came home from an animal rights meeting to a lovely raw lunch made for me by Andy. Zucchini ‘noodles’, fresh spinach from the garden, and tomatoes were the base of the salad, and the dressing was probably technically not raw but had Bragg’s, miso, chilli, rice bran oil, sesame oil, and lots of ginger. I think this meal was inspired by a recipe in the recent food issue of VegNews, but don’t quote me on that.

I love noodles!