Processing

Those of you who follow The Tropical Vegan on Facebook will know that, for my birthday in November, Andy got me a food processor.

For my birthday, I had my heart set on a cherry pie (with hippo crust decor, obvi). I nearly bought cherry pie filling from USA Foods, then saw the recipe for cherry pie in Pies and Tarts with Heart so decided to make my own.

BIG MISTAKE. Frozen cherries in Australia are NOT the sour cherries that make cherry pie so delicious. It was good pie, but it wasn't cherry pie, not really. My craving continues. 

It's a Cuisinart, which he found on sale through some online place, and I don't know how much it costed because it was a gift! But I do know that I love it. It has made possible some dishes we couldn't really do before, and made lots easier plenty of things we did in other ways. (Like massive batches of pesto... in a mini chopper!)

Here I will just brag about one meal, in which just about every ingredient went through the processor - because if you're gonna use it, you might as well use it, right? Washing it all up feels less onerous that way.

Step one: chop a red onion, some garlic, and a head of broccoli in the processor until they're pretty finely chopped, then saute.

 Put it into a pie crust. I should have really made my own, which is easy now with a food processor, but I wasn't organised enough to get my ingredients into the freezer to be really cold, and it's so hot in Townsville at the moment this is kind of crucial. Plus we're trying to empty out our freezer a tad so we can defrost it, so I used bought pastry.

Then put some tofu and a few other things into the processor and, as Jamie Oliver would say, "wazz it up". (He really drives me crazy, but I still watch his show. Some of his recipes are actually good, too!) I used Dynise's recipe for quiche from her pie book.

Pour the custard over the filling, then pop it on the BBQ. I've mentioned 'baking' on the BBQ a few times, but here is what I mean. We have a trivet to keep things away from the direct heat a bit. The temperature needs to be a bit lower than the recipe calls for - this pie got up to the called-for 200 for maybe 5 minutes but still managed to burn a tiny bit on the bottom. 

We have the middle sized Weber Q with the high lid and temp gauge. Good size for baking!

While the quiche is cooking, put the shredder blade on the processor and push some potatoes through.

Mix it all up with some flour and other stuff - we used the recipe for Baked Latkes from Betty Goes Vegan - and form into patties. Put them on a baking tray (along with two okras, if your garden is producing in a very slow manner, like ours...) and when the quiche is done, put these on the BBQ. They took 15 or 20 minutes, and I flipped once.

The quiche needs to rest for 20 minutes, so this works out perfectly.

The quiche turned out really well - it set beautifully but wasn't claggy, like some recipes can be.

The latkes were crunchy on the outside and soft inside. I think using a food processor makes it much easier to make hash brown-type potato recipes -- when shredding by hand, the potatoes seem to let off a lot more liquid than they do when machine-shredded.

And it's dinner time! This was a very little effort meal, and all cooked outside - perfect for the heat wave we're going through.

And for dessert, something I food processed on an earlier day - chocolate mousse tart. The food processor makes it so much easier to crush gingernut biscuits for the crust, and the mousse was silky and smooth. It was just four ingredients, too - 6 tablespoons of soy milk, 200 grams of chocolate, 250 grams of silken tofu and 400mL of coconut milk. After melting together the soy milk and chocolate (which was practically melted after sitting on the counter for an hour), wazz it up with the tofu and coconut milk. Andy thought I did it wrong, because the mixture was so runny, but after a few hours in the fridge, it becomes a rich, velvetty mousse.

This is probably the best birthday present Andy's ever got me, and he has enjoyed the products of it as much as I have!

Dr Andy

We took an entire day off yesterday, doing absolutely nothing related to moving house, because it was time to celebrate something else entirely.

After starting university as a future engineer in 2002, switching to marine biology in 2003, doing an undergrad degree, an honours, and then a PhD, Dr Andy has graduated.

And I managed to coerceconvince him to go through the ceremony, so he donned his best Hogwart's robes, put on his floppy hat, but we couldn't find the wands. Congratulations, Doc!

Submission Cake

Andy submitted his PhD today.  Aside from giving Nacho a comfy perch from which to disapprove...

This milestone represents a great opportunity to make cake, and eat (and possibly drink a little, too).  But instead of just any cake, I somehow got the idea to make the cake in the shape of a butterflyfish, because that is the group of fishes he studied throughout his PhD.  Andy was totally sceptical that it would work, but I received encouragement via Facebook and the tea room at work.  So I forged ahead.

First, I traced the fish, Chaetodon plebeius, onto baking paper and then scanned it in and blew it up to pan-sized.

Then I used more baking paper to trace the shape and cut it out, to make my template.

The next step was to bake the cakes.  I decided to do two rectangle cakes, so the fish could be swimming in a blue ocean.

Once the cakes were cool, I "glued" my template down with a bit of icing, to keep it from moving around, and then cut around it to get the fish shape right.

A thin layer of blue icing on the bottom, then I put the fish-shaped cake on top and coated in yellow icing.

Some tidying up of icing (tip from watching my mum: a butter knife or finger dipped in water is the perfect way to get a smooth icing finish), and then adding on of details like stripes, a blue patch, and a fin.  All this was done before 10.30am, because I was super excited and couldn't wait!

Finally, I finished with the "black" (aka light brown and chocolate) stripe and spot, and used a little piece of strawberry for an eyeball.

A final tidy-up, and in the end we had to swap the strawberry (which was oozing juice and messing up the cake) for a dried cherry, but I'm pretty chuffed with the end result.

Congratulations, Andy!

Snippets.

My grumpy mood from the other day subsided, aided by food and drink, and it has since turned into an obnoxiously bubbly mood once more. Even the dry wind this morning didn't make me stop smiling.

Things I am happy about:

• Andy is coming home today
• I submitted a book proposal to this competition on Tuesday, the winner of whom gets a book contract for their PhD dissertation, and the judge said it looks interesting and he looks forward to reading it. I'm sure that's the stock response, but still. !!
• My trainer thinks I'm a super badass because I can do straight-leg deadlifts. Also, exercise releases endorphins, so this is further adding to my chirpy disposition.
• Peanut Butter Scotch biscuits.

• A baby pineapple in the backyard. Daawww, look how cute.

• Also cute, Nacho cat. I think she's the best.

Get stuffed.

Somehow I managed to accumulate a ridiculous backlog of photos, so that although the weather warmed back up to very high-20s a few weeks ago, I still have winter food photos which I haven't posted.

First, sausage rolls--puff pastry stuffed with a mix of bulgur, tvp, veggies and spices. I posted about these before, at which time I put half the unbaked rolls into the freezer. I'm happy to report that they work well going from freezer into oven, though of course they take a little bit longer to bake. We had our sausage rolls with our newest favourite side dish, Cauliflower Popcorn. This is literally just cauliflower cut up quite small, tossed with salt and/or spices, and baked at 200 (400F) until they get soft and caramelised. Seriously yummy. We also threw some corn and carrots in the oven while it was on to add colour to our plate. (Ooops, edited to add the link to the sausage roll recipe.)

Next is stuffed butternut pumpkin. Andy made this, and it was so long ago that I honestly don't remember what was in it. But as above, the star of the show was the side dish. Roasted daikon radishes, with just a little salt, pepper and garlic. The salad was pretty good too, all tomato and avocado and snowpea shoots.

And in keeping with the other two meals, the side dish was actually the best component of this last meal as well. The entree was gnocchi with tomato sauce, made by Andy. He fried the gnocchi and then added the bubbling sauce to the very hot skillet, and ended up with a tomato-ey Mount Vesuvius. Seriously, tomato sauce was erupting all over the kitchen for about five minutes. The side dish was delicious and not quite so messy. Andy called these "garlic bread zucchinis" and they were basically that--chunks of bread, roasted garlic and oil stuffed into hollowed out zukes and put under the griller for a few minutes. The salad was also fab with its raw corn and fresh dill.

A few more recent meals.

These ones nearly got lost in the mess of my pictures file at home, so lest they be lost forever I will do another mostly-photos post.

This is Urban Vegan's recipe for Cameroon Mafe from her upcoming cookbook. Testing has officially been over for months, but we really love a lot of the dishes we've made so we keep revisiting them! I can't wait for the cookbook to come out. You may recall that I've made this once before; that time I used TVP chunks, this time TVP mince. I think I prefer the chunks.

For breakfast one lazy Saturday morning, we whipped up a batch of pancakes with raspberry-apple sauce. A great way to start the day!

Deconstructed sushi salad--for that delicious sushi-ness without all the rolling. This was my first attempt at making sushi rice, and I followed the method provided in The Tropical Vegan Kitchen cookbook... and it was a bit of a dud. Maybe dud is too strong a term, but the rice was still super sticky. I've downloaded some instructions from an authentic looking website for my next attempt. The sushi rice was mixed with roasted nori flakes and then topped with avocado, shredded carrot, cucumber and pickled ginger. I made a salad dressing from mayo, wasabi, brown rice vinegar and soy sauce that accompanied the salad perfectly.

More fried gnocchi. This time, prior to adding the gnocchi to the skillet, I sauted some onions, mushrooms and seitan. After the gnocchi fried for about 8 minutes I added some baby endive and a splash of balsamic vinegar. Very quick but delicious.

This last meal was a joint effort. I made the brown rice. Andy made a rendition of 'Chickpeas and Lentils' from The Alternative Vegan. And I made eggplant bharta with the addition of radish greens at Andy's request. The chickpeas and lentils combination was SO good. The smoky spices and tomato were subtle yet sexy, and made love to my tastebuds. The bharta was only okay. From now on we'll leave out the radish greens.

If anyone needs proof that a non-vegan can survive on plant-based meals, I'll leave you with Andy's opinion of our vegan lifestyle:

A feminist, vegan, anti-consumerist wedding.

My camera batteries have been dead for a week, so I’ve missed out on photographing lots of comfort food meals—mac & cheese, vegetable chowder, shepherd’s pie (topped with bright purple sweet potato!), lentil loaf… I do have a backlog of photos from before, but they are on my home computer, and I am currently at uni. So I will use this opportunity to let you all know about some wedding plans.

Andy and I went through a lot of different ideas on what we wanted to do. After a few months we both agreed that eloping to the rainforest was the most agreeable plan… but then I spent a few days with Andy’s mum in January, and started seriously second guessing myself. We changed dates and plans about a million times, but finally, six months after getting engaged, we made a final decision. Instead of eloping, we are having a small, private ceremony in the rainforest… a year from now. We were trying for this year, but I realised my PhD is my first priority, and I don’t have the brain capacity to think about both things right now.

So, next June my parents will come over from the US and Andy’s parents will come up from New South Wales. We’ll all congregate in the Daintree Rainforest, which is a 135 million+ year old rainforest about 5 hours north of Townsville. It is literally a relic of Gondwanaland. Andy and I will stay at the Daintree Eco Lodge, a low-impact but super swish resort in the jungle--we get a jacuzzi on our balcony!

That is also where we will have our ceremony, and dinner afterwards (when asked if they can cater for an entirely vegan meal, as well as daily breakfasts, they said “of course”). I nearly wrote off the concept of resort wedding packages, but this one works out to be cheaper than doing things ourselves, and it is still very personalisable. Plus, look how pretty.

The ceremony will incorporate rituals we like the idea of while rejecting things we think are lame. We’re avoiding anything that implies that two people “become one” when they are married—we both intend to stay separate individuals well into the future. We’re avoiding such patriarchal relics as the “giving away” of the bride. And we’re also avoiding shoes.

We’re also trying to avoid excessive consumption. The easiest way to do this is to have virtually no guests. There are no expectations of wedding favours, or gifts, or place cards, or invitations. We’ll try to DIY whatever we can, and whenever possible farm things out to our highly skilled friends. For instance, I have a friend who designs and makes clothing, so I’ve asked her to design a dress for me. I’ve been looking into eco-friendly fabrics for the dress as well.

Since it’s still so far away, we haven’t really done much planning. Like I said, I’m focusing on my PhD for now. I don’t expect to have that much planning to do ever, though, since we’ve consciously chosen the most low-key option that suits our relationship, our individual personalities, and our values.

Happy food

Aside from mangoes, one of the food that makes me the happiest is avocado. And, yay for me, avocado season is here again. Avo season is one of those that varies every year, so I still haven't gotten my head around when to expect cheap, buttery green orbs in the markets. But here they are, and the ones on the cheap now are Shepherd Avocadoes--my favourite variety. We got a bag of five biggies from the market for $2.50.
Naturally, we've been eating them with abandon. On sandwiches, cut up on the side of lunch, and mashed up with salad and beans for burritoes.
Aside from avocadoes, other meals have been making my mouth happy lately. Like these Bombay Rock Potatoes and Chickpeas, deliciously spiced and coated in tomatoey sauce.
Other happy food is pretty much anything that can be on the table minutes after we think to make it, and that tastes good. Last week when I made steamed dumplings, we froze half before cooking them. So when we were feeling hungry but lazy a few days ago, we pulled them out of the freezer, steamed them up and filled up on the yummy spicy-sweet BBQ tofu filling.
Aside from food, the other things that make me happy lately include submitting papers to conferences and journals, finding a cute winter jacket for $8 from the second hand shop, and drinking herbal tea. Oh what? You're wondering why I need a winter jacket when I live in the tropics? Well, I'm going to Manchester, England in April for a conference. I'll also be getting to Conwy (Wales) and Liverpool--so if any of you have any good suggestions on where to find veg food in any of those places, please let me know.

Two things always make me happy... Andy and Nacho.

Finger bling

We went to pick up the engagement ring yesterday.

We were pleasantly surprised when it came up at the register with a 50% discount.

Then Andy's parents took us for dinner at a yummy Thai restaurant. We got spring rolls, vegetable salad (like Thai Beef salad but with sauteed veggies instead of dead cow), and tempura-battered veggies with peanut sauce. It was all very good--I think we've found our new favourite Thai place in Townsville.

Good news.

I know I mentioned a few posts ago that I had good news to share with you all.

Andy and I are engaged.

As a feminist, marriage is a concept I’ve struggled with. On the one hand, something about weddings has always appealed to me. They are pretty, it’s nice to celebrate love, they bring together family and friends who don’t often see each other. On the other hand, marriage is an institution with a pretty tarnished history. It isn’t exactly a pillar of equality. Weddings themselves are imbued with patriarchal and religious symbolism, and the language of traditional weddings is really abhorrent (honour and obey? Fuck off). And contemporary weddings have become a huge profit-making industry—I read last week that the average Aussie wedding costs $40,000.

However, not all weddings and marriages have to fall into that model. There are a lot that don't. I think that if both individuals are aware of the problems, they can be overcome. And for that reason, I felt comfortable saying yes when Andy asked me to marry him (in a very non-traditional manner). He gets it. I’m not saying our relationship is perfect—if it were, we would probably both be pretty bored. But, over the past four years we have both been challenged, and we’ve worked together to achieve what I think is a pretty egalitarian relationship (of course, we’ll have to keep working together as the years progress!).

I’m over the moon about this new turn our relationship has taken. We’ve made no plans yet (and probably won’t for a while, given our schedules until December—he’s away for 6 weeks, then I’m away for a week, then his parents are here, then he’s away for a month, then I’m away for two weeks), but I’m looking forward to doing things our own way.

¡Feliz cumpleaños!

This weekend was Andy’s birthday. Because I’ve been so busy lately, I nearly accepted his wishes to do nothing. But luckily, I got an email from a friend of his and we deviously planned a picnic at the beach anyways. It started as a regular old picnic, but as the week progressed it turned into a fiesta. Andy’s friend made some pretty mean Sangria, complete with lots of boozy fruit floating around in it. There was even a piñata. Of course, it had what every birthday should have— Morning phone calls from Mum, late night text messages from siblings who nearly forgot it was your birthday, and presents...

To fit with the fiesta theme, this was the food we had.

Salsa bean dip. This was meant to be a layered dip, but the salsa and the sour cream layers mixed together, so we just mixed them up with the beans and topped with sour cream and some fiesta-ish corn, coriander and capsicum. We had this with corn chips, and everyone said it must have MSG in it because it was so addictive. Then they heard it was vegan, and it had tofu (sour cream) in it, and they were a bit surprised—but luckily it was so addictive that they kept eating.

There was a green salad which had spinach and rocket, grated carrot, raw corn, capsicum, olives, snowpea shoots, and tomato.

Andy’s favourite coriander-lime potato salad. Instead of the usual cucumber we added a yellow capsicum and some spring onions. This was another suspected MSG-dish. After everyone had finished eating, they kept sticking their forks into the bowl to steal more potatoes.

Andy and I had black bean burgers. This is basically Chickpea Cutlets but with black beans, some chilli-capsicum spread, polenta and Mexican seasoning.

For dessert... Mexican Chocolate Cake, of course! I looked around for a few recipes, but I settled on this one because I was intrigued by the use of balsamic vinegar instead of plain. Instead of using cayenne powder, I soaked a whole cayenne chilli which had been cut open in the water for the cake, so it infused some spice without being too much. However, it didn’t work well enough and the cake was more cinnamon-y than spicy. So for the topping, I made a simple ganache—1/4 cup of soy milk, a tablespoon of sugar, some cinnamon and the tiniest dash of cayenne. Bring that to the boil and then I stirred in a block of Green & Black’s 70% cocoa bar. The ganache was nice and thick, so it basically set on top of the cake but was still really easy to cut and bite through.

The cake was another winner. Everyone said first of all how good it looked, and then, after we cut into it, how tasty it was. After packing everything up, one of Andy's friends asked, 'So that cake was completely vegan?' I never understand why people are surprised when vegan food tastes good.

Happy Birthday, Andy!