Breakfasts....

Breakfast has always been my favourite meal. Before going vegan, visiting my local diner for breakfast was a common activity—at any time of day or night. As a vegetarian, breakfast out was still easy, but eschewing all animal products makes restaurants a bit trickier, especially for morning meals. Visits to the diner meant a side of home fries with butter-free toast and loads of ketchup and hot sauce.

When cooking at home, the vegan breakfast possibilities are limited only by your imagination. Smoothies, pancakes, waffles, French toast, tofu scrambles, breakfast burritos, muffins, scones… But, since moving back to Australia, I seem to have fallen into a breakfast rut. I blame it on a few things. One is lack of kitchen equipment—no waffle iron means no waffles, no blender means no smoothies, and I’ve only very recently gotten a muffin pan. Another reason is a lack of ingredients. How can I make tempeh bacon when the only tempeh in the shops tastes like mush? The main reason, though, is Andy’s narrow thoughts on breakfast. For morning meals, he likes cereal, porridge, or stuff on toast (namely, spaghetti).

Every now and then I try, gently, to push him outside of his breakfast comfort zone with a tofu frittata or a breakfast burrito, but he thinks it tastes like a dinner, rather than a breakfast. Sometimes I make muffins or scones, but he doesn’t like pastry for breakfast. Mostly, though, we eat cereal, porridge, and spaghetti on toast—not the most photogenic of meals.

On the weekends, we sometimes make pancakes. I generally stick to recipes, sometimes playing around with different spice and topping combinations. Andy, on the other hand, lets his imagination run wild. These pancakes have pureed mango, shredded coconut, orange marmalade, nutmeg, and I don’t remember what else. They are coloured bright blue thanks a whole bottle of blue food dye we acquired from a friend who was clearing out a kitchen before moving interstate. I called them smurf pancakes—they are so blue they match the plate!

Oatmeal is a great breakfast, especially on the days when we bike to uni because it leaves us feeling full all morning. Plus, it’s easy to play around with different flavours to keep it from getting boring. Strawberry jam, cinnamon, and dried fruit are a good combo.

Our basic, fallback porridge is dried mixed fruit, soy milk, cinnamon, and brown sugar.

When we had all those mushrooms the other week, I decided I wanted to have a big cook-up brekky. I sautéed the mushies with soy sauce and maple syrup. I also made some home fries with onion, potato, shredded carrot, and diced tomato, all spiced with caraway and wattle seeds. And, to add some much needed sauciness to the plate, baked beans (aka a tin of cannellini beans mixed with a tin of tomato soup). The piece of toast was perfect for mopping up all the flavours that were left on the plate.

Walnut date bread—for those really good dates, this is the perfect thing to serve for breakfast the next morning. Just kidding. Sort of. Dates and walnuts and LSA and oats and whole meal flour. It’s a hearty, filling bread that made great toast.

It also made great Fronch Toast, the VwaV recipe. I thought this was great. It reminded me of all those late night trips to Denny’s and ordering Fabulous French Toast with lots of maple syrup… yum. Andy didn’t love it. I tell him he’s a breakfast grinch.

Who doesn't love to read some news with brekky? Here's a really good article about why we still need feminism--here's a spoiler: women are still oppressed!

Breakfast sandwich.

I have never, ever been a fan of bacon, even when I was nowhere near  vegetarian.  It's greasy and chewy and overall not nice, in my opinion.  I have eaten veggie bacon about once, at university, and it was chemically-tasting and the texture was just ...odd.  And I think that the veggie rashers for sale in Townsville have eggwhite in them (though I've never really checked closely).  And I've never made tempeh bacon -- we rarely buy tempeh, and don't have key ingredients like liquid smoke -- so I haven't had a vegan version of the crispy pig strips in years.

However, I do miss me a good breakfast sandwich.  Breakfast (or rather, brunch) has long been my favourite meal because I love the blending of sweet and savoury.  Andy is a bit of a breakfast grinch, and believes that sweet and savoury should rarely meet -- particularly not in his breakfast.

So when he was in Thailand a few weeks ago, I took the opportunity to sweet'n'savoury-it-up.

I marinated a few thinly sliced pieces of tofu in a mixture of soy sauce, brown sugar, cider vinegar and olive oil.  Then I cooked them in my cast iron pan until they were pretty crunchy.  Layered on toast with the ripest red market tomato, and slightly obscene amount of avocado, this was the perfect combination of sweet and salty.

I have recreated this simple marinade a few times since then, and Andy loves it, too -- for dinner at least.

New twists on familiar foods

I read in a magazine once that most people have an average of nine meals that they eat regularly in differing rotations, and they only occasionally step outside of that repertoire.

I don’t know if Andy and I fit into that statistic exactly, but we do have some staple meals that come up every fortnight or so. Normally we keep them pretty standard, but every now and then we’ll spice things up with some new flavour combinations.

Pizza is a perfect example. We have pizza fairly often, usually topped with chicken-style seitan, pineapple, capsicum, mushrooms, olives, and tomatoes. To mix things up, we tried a new topping combination that I’ve been meaning to try for a while now: Potato and Sausage Pizza. A simple crust provided the base garlicky tomato sauce spiced with oregano and aniseed, thinly sliced potatoes, and veggie sausages, all topped with freshly ground pepper and fresh rosemary. Andy was more than sceptical when I told him my plan for the pizza crust, but the simple elegance of this pizza won him over quickly (though he did add BBQ sauce to his half).

Notice the way the toppings come right up to the edge of the crust? Andy hates plain crust bites, whereas I enjoy a few of those at the end of my pizza slice. Similar to couples who have half-cheese/half-cheeseless, we have half-exposed crust, half-toppings right to the edge. How’s that for a compromise?

Risotto is a meal we have once a month, and our favourite is definitely lemon risotto with green peas. Unfortunately, lemons are expensive during the summer, so we have to change things up a bit. In my head (so Andy didn’t make fun of me), I called this ‘The Incredible Hulk Risotto’, because it was green, ‘meaty’, vegan and a little out of the ordinary. Yep, that’s right, The Hulk was veg, a little known fact I picked up when I was a member of the Vegan Freak Forums (which I unfortunately had to quit because it was taking up too much time and internet quota). Apparently there is one edition of the comic book where Bruce Banner is eating lunch and his co-workers make fun of his tofurkey sandwich. Out comes the green monster, shouting ‘TOFURKEY NOT FUNNY!!’

Anyways. The stock was a mixture of bad-tasting white wine we needed to use up, the dregs of a BBQ sauce bottle washed out with water, mushroom soaking liquid, and green herb stock powder. We stirred that into the Arborio rice along with broccoli, frozen spinach, green peas, and minced up veggie sausages.

Store-bought gnocchi is good for an easy meal that doesn’t require a lot of work. We usually pair it with a mushroom cream sauce, or a jarred tomato sauce. Inspired by Megan the Vegan, I wanted to try something a little different. I cubed some chicken-style seitan and sautéed it in veggie stock and bragg’s for a few minutes. Then I sautéed some mushrooms and cooked the gnocchi. Afterwards, I put the cooked mushrooms and seitan in the pan with the gnocchi and some fresh baby spinach, and poured in a mix of veggie stock, balsamic vinegar, and arrowroot. After taking it off the heat I mixed in ½ c. or so of minced fresh parsley. I would have liked the sauce to be a bit thicker, but it was a very yummy combination, anyways.

Finally, breakfast. I know I only recently lamented my boring breakfast repertoire. Saturday morning I woke up and really felt like corn muffins. I know that Andy isn’t a fan of muffins for breakfast, but I thought I could enjoy some fabulous corn muffins while he ate a boring bowl of cereal. As I was gathering ingredients, the good Theresa on my shoulder spoke louder than the selfish one, and I thought Andy might want some pancakes. Since the polenta was out, I made corn pancakes as a variation on our normal flapjacks. I would have added lemon or blueberries, but we didn’t have any. Still, I really liked them. They were like a denser version of corn bread. Andy didn’t love them, he didn’t even really like them, but he doesn’t like the gritty feeling of polenta in baked goods.

Plus, he’s a breakfast grinch, remember?

PS... Aussie vegans, voting has opened for the Aduki vegan awards. Vote for your favourite veg stuff!

Brunch

Who would have guessed that chickpea power is such a wonderful ingredient in brunch? Isa Chandra Moskowitz, that's who. I don't know how she figures out her recipes, but I'm pretty sure she is a goddess.

First it was the chickpea flour in her Fronch Toast recipe. That was a revelation, especially after a few attempts at other recipes involving silken tofu, apple sauce, and other messy ingredients. Fronch toast is easy to put together and doesn't involve any blenders or food processers, so it's a great recipe for the morning.

We love our Fronch Toast served up with jam and even a bit of tofutti cream cheese.

But then Isa reached new heights with an omelet recipe that actually works. I've tried a few other omelet recipes that have resulted in mushy tofu scramble because they just don't hold up. This one did, and it tasted divine.
Andy thought it was a bit weird--apparently his idea of an omelet involved the filling being mixed in with the batter and cooked like a pancake, so next time I'll try that. And he thought it could be a dinner, rather than a breakfast, but then he's a breakfast grinch.

Weekend grub

Remember my lament about living with a breakfast grinch? Well, since I’m home alone I’m taking advantage of my weekend mornings and having breakfast foods galore. I started the brunch extravaganza this weekend with Fronch Toast, from Vegan with a Vengeance (with the addition of some cinnamon to the batter, because that’s how I roll). This really brought back memories of my pregan days; it really is good. I used a big bakery hot dog roll, which I left in the fridge overnight to dry it out. I realised after soaking the bread slices in the batter that I should have sliced it before drying it out—the outside was nice and crusty but the inside got a little soggy.

I spent my Saturday writing a grant application, which, if you’ve had any experience with, you will know it totally sucks. For instance, I’m expected to provide a brief methodology of the research, an abstract of my two planned conference papers, and justify 9 separate budget items, all in 10 lines of text. And those ten lines are weighted at 25% of the total application. To keep me nourished for all that fun, I made a nice big lunch.

I made a chickpea, corn and tomato salad. Instead of combining it all with mayo, I used a mixture of avocado, apple cider vinegar, tahini and rehydrated wakame. I put the salad into a tortilla, and it was interesting and tasty.

The salad kept me going through the tedious process, and some wine helped to ease my frustrations. In the afternoon I tried my hand at boiled seitan for the first time. Despite the long boiling time, there is really very little hands-on time. But texture-wise, I think I prefer baked seitan.

A late afternoon bike ride worked up my hunger for dinner, so I turned some of the boiled seitan into ‘Jerk Seitan’ from Vegan with a Vengeance, and served it with a side of coconut rice and veggies sautéed in the jerk sauce. Even though it’s getting a bit chilly here, this dinner tasted like the tropics.

On Sunday morning I rode to the markets and stocked up on produce for the coming week. While I was there, I saw some fresh-looking Brussels sprouts, so I grabbed them. I’ve tried them once before, when I was very young, and they were frozen and boiled and not very nice. But I’d noticed a recipe in VwaV that intrigued me, so I gave it a try for dinner. Since I had the oven on, I baked some sweet potato rounds with just a touch of sea salt. Leftover rice rounded the meal of quite nicely. The Brussels sprouts verdict? I liked them okay, but I didn’t think they were fantastic.

After a day of reading, transcribing, gardening and cleaning house, at about 8:30 Sunday night I remembered that I signed up to bring food to the postgraduate morning tea this morning, so I quickly threw together some ginger biscuits. Two didn't fit in the container, so I had to eat them...

I thought weekends were supposed to be relaxing?