Starting the Day

Mornings at our house, at least Monday to Friday, look a little bit like this...

Sometime between 4.30 and 5.00am: Tika wakes up, walks to my side of the bed and licks my face. If she's feeling very generous, she goes to Andy's side of the bed and licks him, too. If she's feeling very rambunctious, her tail wags the whole time against the wall, making a noisy thunk-thunk-thunk. We *very politely* ask Tika to go back to bed, and she usually does... for about 10 minutes at a time.

5.00am: I get out of bed, feed Nacho, and take Tika for a walk or, more recently, a run.

We're coming up to the final week of the Couch to 5k program, which is a gradual introduction to running. It's pretty impressive, because I've long been very anti-running, but I really don't mind it now. This morning I ran 23 minutes without dying, or even feeling terribly puffed. Part of the success may be because I didn't really start from couch, but rather from walking-5k-at-a-fairly-cracking-pace. I fill my ears with podcasts, usually either Team Earthling or Progressive Podcast Australia.

5.45-6.00: I get home. Usually Andy's still in bed - the luxury! I try to remember to stop and smell the flowers before I have a good stretch.

We organise lunch for the day, put last night's dishes away, and then, my favourite part of the day: breakfast! I pretty much always eat granola (though on the weekends we are fans of toast, or mushrooms, or pancakes). But, since I started running, I have a very big appetite, so I have been supplementing my plain granola with some chia goo and fruit. The chia seeds have highly concentrated nutrients - plenty of fat and calories, which keeps me full for longer!

Granola with chia goo, bananas and blueberries with soy milk.

Granola, mango, chia goo, and soy milk.

By  7am we've usually fed Tika and hopped on our bikes to go in to work - I love getting in really early, when it's nice and quiet and I can get lots of work done. We're creatures of habit, but I love a solid start to my days!

It's baaaack...

Mango season is here again! It's been glorious so far - Andy went picking around the trees where he works, I was birthday-gifted some beautiful Bowen mangoes (aka Kensington Prides) from a friend's tree, and I was handed a few by a maintenance guy pruning the trees on a school near our house when I was walking the dog. We've been eating mangoes for a few weeks now, and just bought our first bucket from the markets last weekend.

Black bean nachos with mango-avocado salsa.

Obviously Andy and I love mangoes. We are always trying to find ways to make them last throughout the year. We've already made chutney, and no doubt the next few weeks will see our dehydrator full of mango slices and fruit rolls, our freezer full of mango pieces, and our bread maker full of jam.

Tropical sorbet & fresh mango

I'm looking forward to these next few weeks, as Bowen season gives way to the smaller, tart Asian varieties and the big-as-your head Palmers and Keitts. We're even contemplating planting one of these other varieties in our garden, but for now we're very happy to eat lots and lots of mangoes without having to clean up any of the mess.

Birthday Weekend

As I said in my Jervis Bay post, we've had a few busy weekends in a row. The weekend after we returned from the south coast we had many things on - it was my birthday, and it was also the weekend of the Travelling Film Festival in Townsville, and we had our usual garden / house stuff to do.

I saw 5 films with the Travelling Film Festival (Andy saw 2 with me). My favourite of the weekend was easily Searching for Sugar Man, a really intriguing documentary about a musician I'd never heard of before, but wish I had. He was big in South Africa (what the film is about) and Australia, but was a total flop in the US. The first half of the film is dark and broody, but for the second half I couldn't really stop smiling because it was just so... uplifting. I really recommend this movie.



My second favourite was Moonrise Kingdom, a Wes Anderson film. I love his other work, and this one was similarly story-book quirky and just charming.

Paul Kelly: Stories of Me was a really interesting film about Australia's most prolific singer-songwriter. It was a little disjointed - more a biography than a narrative about something interesting, in the way that Sugar Man is.

Lore, a story about the children of an SS Officer right at the end of WWII who have to travel across Germany, and end up travelling with a Jewish man leaving a concentration camp, was heavy and thought-provoking and interesting. It was no light film, but it was worthwhile.

Chinese Takeaway was really sweet - a comedic look at some serious subject matter, but I was taken aback by the way that many people in the audience laughed uproariously at bits that I thought were more sad than funny. That aside, the film was really gorgeous.

In between the films, I had a friend over for dinner on Saturday evening. Then on Sunday (my actual birthday) I had a couple of people over before we went to see Paul Kelly and Chinese Takeaway. Since the films started at 6.30pm, I thought some heartier food was in order. So I made a batch of focaccia, with tomatoes and basil and garlic on top.

And of course some cake. Or rather, macadamia blondies. This is the recipe from Vegan with a Vengeance.

The recipe had a topping involving maple syrup and more macadamias, but I decided to go for a simple salted caramel topping instead. Baked on the blondies for the last 10 minutes, it was a little sticky-sweet without being overly messy.

These, plus some mojitos, made a great Sunday afternoon with friends. So even though the weekend was busy, it was all fun stuff!

Jervis Bay

Hi from Brisbane! I've just come back from the Green Edge with Amy, K & Toby, and Susan. But that's a story for another post. We've had a few crazy-busy weekends in a row. One of them involved a trip to the south coast for Andy's brother's wedding. Getting there was literally planes, trains and automobiles... we flew to Sydney, got (three) trains to Kiama, and then Andy's parents picked us up and drove us down to Huskisson, a very nice little town in Jervis Bay.

Kiama, on the way down the coast.

We stayed in Huski for two nights, and did a bit of sight-seeing around the area. It's a gorgeous place.

We went to nearby Hyam's Beach, which is apparently in the Guinness Book for having the whitest sand in the world. I don't know how it compares to, say, Whitehaven Beach in the Whitsundays, but a lot of my photos were over-exposed because it was so white.

On Thursday afternoon, we made a few salads - Andy's parents were in charge of food for the pre-wedding BBQ, so we helped out with a couscous & chickpea salad, and a pasta salad.

Then we went for a walk on the beach, where we found empty shark's egg shells...

Port Jackson shark egg

And where Andy got really excited over seaweed - his area of expertise now in his new job. We collected some Ulva intestinalis to make fresh seaweed salad, but it was gritty so we didn't eat much of it.

We looked around in the tidal pools, screeching at the icy cold water.

On Friday we left Huskisson and went deep into Booderee National Park, which is actually not in NSW - it's a federal territory - to the cabins where the wedding was. We went for more walks on the beach - this time, not in Jervis Bay, but on the open ocean side. It was windy, and cold, but really beautiful.

Sussex Inlet - a bit more protected but still chilly. 

Andy's brothers and their WAGs on Brewherre Beach.

The wedding on Saturday afternoon was just lovely. At the reception, there was a lolly bar (that's a candy bar in American-speak), which had plenty of vegan lollies. The vegan coconut ice was the hit of the night, but  the choc-PB cupcakes were good, as were the vegan marshmallows.

It was good to be catered for, but even better to see Andy's family, to be part of a beautiful wedding, and to get away from work for a few days!

Book review: The New Scoop

A few weeks ago, I received an email from Alina Niemi, creator of the new vegan ice cream book The New Scoop: Recipes for Dairy-Free, Vegan Ice Cream in Unusual Flavors (Plus Some Old Favorites). She: would I like a copy to review? Me: Uh, yeah.

Actually, the conversation was a bit more nuanced than that. She explained that, coming from Hawaii, her ice cream recipes include lots of weird tropical fruits - which of course I love! Her ice cream recipes also didn't require the cooking method that we usually employ - and anything to make ice cream easier is something I am willing to try. She sent a PDF, and as it is starting to hot up here, the timing was perfect.

We've only tried two of the recipes, because we don't eat ice cream very fast, but I have so many more recipes flagged to try. What I love about this recipe book (I keep wanting to call it a cook book, but that doesn't really work here since there is no cooking) is:

• It is very comprehensive. The first 45 pages are just information about non-dairy ice creams, different types of frozen desserts, key ingredients, and how to actually freeze the mixture to turn it into ice cream (even without an ice cream maker). There are then 100 pages of ice cream recipes. Some use coconut milk, others use tofu, others  non-dairy milk. 
• The flavour varieties are diverse, and there are variations suggested for many f them. I am particularly keen to try Taro Ice Cream (when my taro plants are ready!), Beet-Balsamic Ice Cream, and Peanut Butter & Jelly Ice Cream.
• There is a chapter on yogurt making, followed by a chapter on making frozen yogurt. 
• There is a whole chapter on mochi! I have never actually eaten ice cream mochi, but the room temperature stuff seriously floats my boat. I haven't eaten any since we were in Hong Kong, which was over a year ago, and which is a serious problem. But it sounds not that horrible to make - the only obstacle is that The New Scoop recipe for mochi requires a microwave, which we don't have. However, this chapter has given me lots of ideas, and I will be googling non-microwave methods for making mochi. The chapter in this book has lots and lots of useful tips and information about making mochi, so even if I get a recipe from somewhere else I will be referring back.
• Omg the index! It is good. I get frustrated by some cookbooks because the index isn't very comprehensive, but this will not be one of those books.
• The recipes we've made so far have been yummy!

The first thing we tried was Pineapple Coconut Milk Ice Cream. Making it was much, much easier than cooking: just put pineapple, coconut milk, and sugar into a blender, then chill.

Then freeze. Then eat. It was so yummy, and so easy to make. My friend Belinda said it reminded her of the stuff she eats in Thailand. I thought the cooking was important to get the ice cream to be, you know, creamy... but this recipe totally proves me wrong.

The other recipe we tried was a tofu-based ice cream recipe. Tofu, soy milk, sugar and coffee were blended up together and then chilled and frozen. This ice cream was less creamy than our usual - not bad, but more like the Sanitarium brand stuff you buy in the store here. It also freezes harder. It is delicious, but Andy and I both prefer the coconut milk varieties. 

Apologies for the shonky iPod photo. Camera batteries are dead.

Basically, I prefer this ice cream book to the other one I have, Vegan Scoop. That one basically reproduces the same recipe with flavour variations throughout the book, which quite frankly I can work out for myself. We pretty much use that book for flavour inspiration. But The New Scoop suits us better because it uses actual fruit, flavours we love, and the recipes are a lot more varied. 

Summer is coming up so quickly here in Australia, so I would recommend getting your hands on a copy of this book! Northern hemisphere folks, there are some holiday-ish ice cream recipes, like Spiced Pumpkin, so it's worth a look for you, too, even though it's a bit wintery!

World Vegan Day

Happy World Vegan Month, everyone! Yesterday was World Vegan Day here in our timezone, and with a few extra vegans in Townsville we managed to organise an information table at the university. Stevie and Luc have written up a really great post about it over on the Team Earthling blog. You should really go read that, because it is insightful, it's got all the pretty pictures, and I don't have any of those things to offer at the moment! (Marking, and all that.)

Pesto Factory

A few weeks ago, Andy and I decided that we should dig up one of our garden beds, mix some more organic matter into the soil, widen the bed and edge it properly, so that it didn't dry out so much or be infiltrated with grass so easily. The garden bed in question was growing a big, prolific row of rocket (aka arugula), and a straggly, pathetic row of beetroot. So we harvested them, and as Andy dug, I made pesto.
 

The harvest from our beetroot plants. They weren't so tasty.

This was a serious mission, primarily because we are ill-equipped. Though I sometimes think we are a bit gadget crazy, we don't have a food processor. We have a small mini-chopper, but I smugly thought I would make my pesto by hand in the pestle&mortar.

A pretty big pile of rocket, with some beetroot leaves for pinkness.

This idea, to be quite frank, was a stupid idiot, and I realised as much after one batch. The rocket was stringy, and didn't want to pound down very well. And I would have had to do about 20 batches to get them all done, which would have taken hours for sure.

But I kept the pestle&mortar out and used it to crush up my toasted almonds before they went in to the mini chopper.

 Because it is, ahem, mini, it still took about 6 batches to do. It was a constant, stupid process of making a little batch of pesto, usually in a few stages - crush almonds and garlic, add some rocket, miso and olive oil, blend, add some more rocket, taste, add salt and pepper, and so on - then scraping it out into a bowl and starting again. I had to do a lot of mixing in the bowl, too, because each batch was just a little different. There was pesto and oil EVERYWHERE, and I was feeling a little shmeh at the end from all the tasting of the oily-rich pesto.

But I got there, and managed to make a pretty substantial bowl of pesto.

Andy made me some "lunch" of cucumber & tomato pesto bites, which were really very delicious, and might be a fancy party snack idea.

I transferred the pesto to 6 jars (about 2 meals per jar) and froze 4. We have had pesto on pasta and gnocchi. Because we didn't have any lemon, and because rocket is less exciting than basil, it's never as good as we expect, but it is still yummy.

We've had pesto pizza, too. And we mixed a little pesto in mayo to go with some BBQ veggies.

What's your favourite way to use pesto?

Mushrooms on Toast

I know mushrooms (much like olives) tend to polarise people. Some people hate them, but Andy and I love them. We don't buy them very often, because they are usually about $10 a kilo - which isn't very much when you consider how light they are, but is a mental hurdle we struggle to jump. But when we do see them for a little bit cheaper, we tend to get a lot of them. And, in the interests of using them when they're nice, rather than letting them go slimy in the fridge, we tend to use them as feature ingredients.

One of our favourite uses for mushrooms is breakfast-style, on toast (sometimes for dinner, or lunch, but breakfast-style, anyways). Breakfast mushrooms are quick to make, filling and tasty, and take very little in the way of actual cooking skills. Basically, perfect for a weekend morning. They are also easy to vary. Our favourite way to have them is in the form of Creamy Breakfast Mushrooms, which I'll post a recipe for below, but sometimes we saute them with olive oil and balsamic, or with lime and soy, or just with butter (nuttelex, obvi) and salt & pepper.

So here, step by step, is how I put together a cafe-style breakfast in less than 15 minutes.

Creamy Breakfast Mushrooms

Put a skillet on medium-high heat. Take 4 slices of bread out of the freezer (unless you don't freeze your bread, of course!) to thaw. Peel and thinly slice a clove or two of garlic. Put the garlic, along with 2 tablespoons of olive oil and/or butter in the frying pan.

Grab your mushrooms, wipe any obvious dirt off with a tea towel (don't wash mushrooms - they absorb the water, or something, and it makes them go a bit yuck), and slice them thickly. If you can find them on special, or don't mind paying for them, pre-sliced mushrooms make this SO QUICK.

Put them in the pan with the garlic, and stir them around. The hotter you cook them, the better, because they brown quickly without losing all their liquid and kind of... stewing.

While the mushrooms cook, put 3 tablespoons of corn flour in a jug. Mix in the juice from half a lime, 1 tablespoon of soy sauce, and about 1/3 of a cup of coconut cream. Whisk this together until it's smooth. While you're doing this, stir the mushies every now and then.

If you have some, dash outside really quickly and grab some parsley, and give it a quick chop.

When the mushrooms just start to soften, put your bread in the toaster.

Re-mix up your corn flour mixture and then immediately pour it into the pan with the mushies, and give it a good stir. It should thicken pretty much straightaway. Let it cook for about a minute, and then turn off the heat. Stir in the parsley, and taste to see if it needs salt or pepper.

When the toast is done, you can put on some butter if you're feeling indulgent, or just put it on the plate and scoop some mushrooms on top.

Enjoy!

Doctor Who Party

Last weekend, Australian TV screened the last episode in the latest series of Doctor Who. Andy and I are relatively new Whovians, coming to the series in the last few episodes of David Tennant's period as the Doctor. We've since caught up on almost all the episodes that have made up the new incarnation of Doctor Who, thanks to ABC2's nightly Doctor Who episodes a few months ago. I am completely unfamiliar, though, with the older shows, unfortunately!

Of all the beings, friendly and otherwise, the Doctor encounters, the only ones that genuinely frighten me are the Weeping Angels:

From: http://tardis.wikia.com/wiki/Weeping_Angel

So when I saw that last week's episode would be a Weeping Angel episode, I decided that there would be strength in numbers, and invited two of my Whovian friends over to watch with me.

We started before the show started with some veggie sausage rolls, filled with lentils, bulgur, TVP, and grated carrot. They were really yummy, and between the four of us, we ate this whole tray - Andy was the MVP in that game.

For dessert, we had some "jammie dodgers", which are reportedly the Doctor's favourite food, and also pretended to be a "Tardis remote self-destruct button" in one episode with the Daleks. These are actually Arnott's Raspberry Shortcakes, which are ninja vegan and which I'm pretty sure are the same thing as jammie dodgers.

And I made Ood cupcakes!

Not exactly like the original, but Ood-ish.

From: http://thedoctorwhopodcast.com/forum/index.php?topic=1071.0

These are chocolate cupcakes, with peanut butter icing, and the Ood-ish features are made from cut up Extreme Sour Straps (which are also ninja vegan).

It was a good way to ease the tension of the Weeping Angels! But now Doctor Who is over for another series, and I've got to find something else to do with my Saturday evenings...

Kiwi Coconut Upside Down Cakes

After trying to Eat All The Food in Brisbane last weekend, I spent Sunday getting ready for, and then being at, a Townsville Vegan picnic.

It was supposed to be in one of Townsville's botanical gardens, but the sky was gray and we got scared it would rain (of course it was lovely at the time of the picnic) so we switched the location to my house. It was a small gathering of people, but it was worth doing because I got to meet new vegans! By new vegans, I don't mean that they are newly vegan, but rather that I've never met them before.

You see, we North Queenslanders have recently been joined by Stevie and Luc, creators of the really great vegan podcast Team Earthling. I have been listening to their podcast for a few weeks now, when I walk the dog in the mornings, and I really love it. So it was great to have the opportunity to meet them in person! Me & Andy and Stevie & Luc were also joined by Matt & Thomas. I've known Matt for a few years now and he's one of my main Townsville vegan friends, and his son Thomas has been joining us since he was born a year and a half ago.

I did what I always do and forgot to take pictures of all the picnic food that people brought, despite full intentions to photo-document everything - there was cucumber sushi (from me), bread and bagel chips with guacamole and eggplant-y hummus (Stevie & Luc), chocolate tart, biscuits and fruit (Matt). But I did snap a photo of my sweet offering before people arrived. So I give you that, along with a recipe.

Kiwi Coconut Upside Down Cakes

3 kiwi fruits, peeled and cut into 12 thick slices
1/4 c. vegan butter or coconut oil
1/2 c. brown sugar

1 c. plain flour
1/2 tsp. baking powder
1/2 tsp. bicarb soda
1/4 tsp. salt
1/4 c. coconut oil
1 c. coconut cream
2/3 c. sugar
1 c. desiccated coconut

Lightly oil the sides of a 12-cup muffin tin. In a mini frying pan or saucepan, melt together the vegan butter and brown sugar. Bring it up to the boil, and cook for 3 or 4 minutes, until it starts to get thick and caramel-y. Spoon this into the bottom of each muffin cup. Place a slice of kiwi fruit on top of caramel.

Heat oven to 180 (350F). In a medium bowl, mix together the flour, baking powder, bicarb soda and salt. In a large bowl mix coconut oil, coconut cream, and sugar. Add the dry ingredients to the wet and mix gently. If you overmix this, your cakes will rise in a funny shape which is no good for the upside-downing. Fold in the coconut. Spoon batter gently into the muffin cups on top of the kiwi slices and caramel. Bake for 20 to 22 minutes, until cooked through and springy.

Loosen the cupcakes with a butter knife or similar utensil, then invert the muffin tin onto a board. Gently lift it up as you coax the cakes out of the pan. When I did this, a lot of kiwi fruit slices stayed in the pan, but it's very easy to stick those back on the cakes. And the slightly ragged look of these adds to their appeal, maybe? In any case, they are too yummy to really judge by appearance!