Hot for Harissa

Late to the party is a good way to describe me and food trends. Is harissa still even trendy, or has the hot sauce of the moment shifted to piripiri, sriracha, or something else?

We had a lot of chillies in the last two or so months. The ziplock bag in the freezer was full, so I started threading them on to string to dry out.

When the string got full and the chillies kept coming, Andy and I decided we needed to make some chilli sauce. A few of my cookbooks had recipes, but I can't go past Dynise Balcavage's recipes. Urban Vegan has a harissa recipe with aniseed, so I made a batch of that. And I fell in love. So did Andy. The jar is almost empty in the fridge, so I'll have to make a new batch soon.

I have used it to spice up some pasta with tahini sauce, kale, zucchini and tomatoes.

Kari came to the harissa party late with me, and posted this recipe using harissa powder. I made some small changes to suit what we had - and also, because I mostly remembered the recipe and didn't feel like looking it up. Chickpeas and sweet potatoes got smashed together with harissa paste and other veggies, and fresh coriander.

For dinner we ate it hot in wraps, and the leftovers were really great the next day in salad.

Finally, harissa butter made a delicious base for a kale pizza. Spicy, hearty with the kale, and accompanied by a less spicy, garlic&rocket&cherry tomato pizza.

Even though I'm late, the harissa party is still hot and happening, so, better late than never!

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!

Faux Injera

I love Ethiopian food, and Andy and I have been eating it semi-regularly. It's also a really good thing to cook for guests, because a lot of people haven't tried this cuisine, or at least they don't have it often. Plus, it's yummy, so people tend to like it.

In an effort for authenticity, I bought some very expensive teff flour ($12 for 500 grams!!) in November so I can make injera. But at that price, I'm afraid to screw it up - so I haven't actually opened the pack yet. I am aware that it's been more than 2 months, and I should get over my fears and just dive in. But in the mean time, we had people coming round for dinner and I was serving mesir wat, and I wanted something *like* injera to serve with it.  Here's what I came up with - easypants, gluten free, and spongy like injera. They were missing the sour undertones of teff-based injera, but these chickpea breads were a good accompaniment for those of us who haven't tackled proper injera yet.

1 c. chickpea flour
1 c. water

That's all. I told you they were easypants. In a bowl, mix these two things together. The batter should be like crepe batter - thinner than pancakes, thicker than milk.

Heat up a non-stick skillet over medium-low heat. Brush the pan with a tiny bit of oil. The idea is to cook these quite slowly, so they cook through (because raw chickpea flour tastes terrible) but don't get crispy. Using a ladle, pour a scoop of batter into the pan and immediately spread it out with the back of the spoon. Cook it until bubbles appear and the top is basically completely set. Just like cooking pancakes, but without the browning.

Flip the bread over, and cook for another minute or so before transferring it to a plate.

I had two plates - one for the bread that's just come out of the pan, and one for cooler ones.

After removing the first bread from the pan, start a second one. When it's ready to flip, roll up the one on the plate and put it on plate 2.

Hopefully that makes sense. Letting them cool just a bit before rolling makes them more pliable and less likely to crack.

Once the breads are all cooked, and then fully cooled, wrap them up and store them until the rest of the meal is ready.

One Dish Round Up

For the past few months, I have been testing recipes for Carla's in-the-works cookbook about one-dish meals.  Andy and I tested a bunch of recipes around christmas, and then took a few weeks off from testing, before another big spurt in the last few weeks.  Carla has recently discussed a slight change in direction with her publishers - so I won't be testing any more.  However, I have really loved the recipes we have tested, so I'll post some photos here to give you an idea of the excellence that Carla manages to come up with.

 

 White bean peanut dip tastes like yummy peanut sauce, in dip form.  What else could you want?

Carla's spiced oven wedges have become a popular side dish, like here with sausage rolls.

Baked lemon tofu with green beans reminded me of an excellent flavour combination that I haven't taken advantage of in a while - lemon pepper.  Duh, but yum.  

Cream Sausage & Tomato Pasta was really easy to pull together, and very yummy.

The sauce, bubbling away on the stove after maybe 10 minutes of prepping and cooking.

 

Franks & Beans, which we actually served as "Bangers & Beans" using sausages, was super tomatoey and hearty.  Served with a side of creamy mushrooms, and some toast, this was almost brinner.

One of our favourite recipes is Carla's Crumbed Seitan.  The crumb mixture is a lot more interesting than our usual, so we've had this a few times.

 All fried up, these schnitzels are crispy and tasty.

We had them once with garlic mashed potatoes and mushroom gravy.

Then another time we served them up with mashed sweet potatoes (the ones with purple-red skin and white insides) and Easy Cheesy Gravy from Ultimate Uncheese.

And the leftovers from that were turned into parmas - a jar of enchilada sauce and some leftover cheesy gravy, and popped in the oven for a few minutes.

Two cuisines meet in Ethiopian Sweet Potato Stew, which matches the spices of Ethiopian cooking with the peanut stews of Western Africa, with sweet potatoes and chickpeas.

Seitan, marinated overnight in Thai BBQ marinade and then baked with some veggies and frozen spring rolls, made for a really yummy and really easy weekday dinner.

Red Seitan Curry required more effort than the last meal, but was well worth it on a Sunday evening.  The seitan is cooked in the curry itself, so it is full of flavour with a texture that is quite different to typical seitan.

Corn bread scones were simple to make, full of flavour, soft and delicious.  Declared by Andy to be the best corn bread I've ever made.

We served our scones with Kidney Bean & Sweet Potato Chilli, a thick and herby stew which we topped with jalapeno slices.

We made the chilli with a mix of orange sweet potatoes, and these beauties with an ugly white exterior but a brilliantly violet inside.

The chilli was reincarnated later in the week as Chilli Muffin Loaves, light little muffins with chunks of sweet potato and bean throughout.

Home made tofu is beautiful when marinated and baked, and Carla's Pan Pacific Marinade didn't disappoint.

My advice is to keep your eyes peeled for Carla's cookbooks, because if the recipes I've tried are anything to go by, they will be excellent.

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:

Testing, 1-2-3

As I’ve said, I’m trying not to be a lazy cook when Andy’s out of town. A really good way to make sure I’m not? Commit to trying several new recipes a week from an upcoming cookbook. As Urban Vegan has revealed, she is writing a cookbook and I’ve been lucky enough to be chosen as a tester. Urban Vegan is one of the oldest and most regular readers of my blog (she and bazu were my first readers!) and I’ve been following her blog for more than two years now (maybe three?) so I’m honoured to take part in the testing phase of her cookbook. And they are all so good! Have a look at some of the recipes I’ve been able to test...

Spaghetti con Salsa Fresca, which is really simple—one of those meals in which the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

Focaccia, which I made in four variations—plain, rosemary, olive and roasted tomato.

Moroccan Millet Timbales, served here with avocado yogurt and tofu scramble.

Deconstructed Monkey Bread, which is a very sweet treat, and super quick to put together.

And finally, Cameroon Mafe, with chunks of veggies and tvp in a velvety smooth peanut sauce.

I’ve been trying lots of new foods and I have lots more recipes bookmarked to try in the coming weeks. Check out the Flickr group for more photos from testers.