Storming the Freezer

Last night a cyclone crossed the coast. For the first part of the week, it looked like it was coming pretty much straight at Townsville. I have lived here for nearly 7 years, and while I'm not a local nor a meteorologist, I have seen several cyclones heading straight for Townsville that end up going elsewhere when push comes to shove. So we got prepared by cleaning up the back yard but didn't get too worked up. Good thing, too, because it ended up heading 200kms south of us, and we saw less than 40mm of rain at our house.

One of the things we figured out during Cyclone Yasi, which is rarely given out in official advice, is to eat anything precious from the freezer, so that if the power goes out for a few days you don't have to throw it away. So this week we had a few freezer based dinners. We still have rather a lot in there, but now there is plenty of space for a new batch of ice cream...

We tried some Fry's vegan burgers, which were good but not worth full price. They were delicious with some cherry tomatoes, cooked down with olive oil and garlic.

Here we have tofu (from the freezer) marinated with teriyaki and chilli sauce, spring rolls (from the freezer), BBQ pineapple, and fried rice with capsicum (from the freezer) and eggplant, green beans, cherry tomatoes, sweet potato shoots and baby kale (all from the garden).

When our mulberry tree gets ripe fruit on it, we pick them and stick them in a container in the freezer, till we have enough for something yummy. This container spent an overnight with some oats to become a yummy breakfast.

And for lunch I brought a chickpea naan roll to work, inspired by Joey's link to Dan Lepard's recipe - but with a slightly different filling.

None of this made a massive dent in the freezer stash - we still have about 15 naan rolls, a few boxes of Fry's, a bag of frozen capsicum, 6 blocks of tofu, and other random things. But if any more cyclones form in the coming months, at least we've made a start!

Townsville's vegan revolution: Part 1

Before I went vegan, I loved going out for breakfast. So much so that whenever I went to diners that offered breakfast after 11am, I would usually choose a morning meal no matter the time of day. I almost always ordered french toast, but sometimes pancakes or waffles. Generally sweet things!

Upon going vegan, I had to shift my breakfast-excursions to savoury. In small diners I would order toast or a bagel with home fries and whatever veggie was around, and then usually construct myself a vegan breakfast sandwich. As I was a university student, these breakfast-excursions usually involved a hangover, and the greasy starches quite suited the circumstances, perhaps in a way that sweet breakfast would not.

I still love going out for breakfast, but in Townsville the options are pretty limited. When we do go out, I almost always have to put together a plate of sides - toast, baked beans, mushrooms (if they're not cooked in butter), spinach or avocado. It's pretty satisfying usually. The last time I went out for breakfast, though, was with Andy and some friends, and we didn't realise it was Father's Day until we were out. Our first few attempts were thwarted by completely booked-out cafes. We eventually found a spot at one, I tried to order the vegetarian breakfast with no eggs but was told that customers are not allowed to go off-script. So I ordered the usual sides, but when the baked beans came out they had sausage mixed in. So I was a bit traumatised, and we hadn't been out for breakfast since.

Fast forward to a few days ago. On a local food-related Facebook groups, there was a discussion about vegan breakfasts that brought a new(?) cafe called relish. to my attention. The owner said she had vegan granola, oats, and the plate-of-sides. I clicked "Like" on their page, and put the information away for the future.

The next day, relish. posted this on their Facebook page.

This is fairly revolutionary. Though Townsville is a city of 200,000 or so, the vegan options here are more limited than you would expect. Andy's small hometown of 5,000 in southern NSW has more vegan options. As you can imagine, it is mighty exciting to see a cafe write the word vegan anywhere on a menu, and to advertise it so blatantly. So I mentioned it to Andy and said "Let's go!!". And he said (surprisingly), "Okay, how bout tomorrow?".

And so, this morning, vegan waffles were had.

They came with two sides, so I got the mushrooms and baked beans. Perhaps not the most typical accompaniments to sweet waffles, but I didn't feel like waffles + toast. Everything was good! The mushrooms tasted a touch like vinegar, which is a flavour I love but rarely add to mushrooms when we make them. The baked beans were sweeter and more barbequey than most Aussie breakfast baked beans I've had. And the waffles were crunchy and went nicely with the berries & pomegranate syrup I ordered with them. Relish, if you read this, you should absolutely make them a permanent menu item! And/or veganise those cornmeal pancakes, because I would totally be all over that.

I will definitely come back here - in fact, when it's a bit cooler, it will be a lovely bike ride destination. I noticed bike parking around the side. Most of the tables are outside, and there are plenty of them. There was a cute but really cheeky and persistent sparrow who hung out on our table and really had no fear of humans. They have, in the style of American diners, bottomless drip coffee for $4 with any meal. It's a tad pricey, but I thought it was good value for money (but we almost never go out to eat, so maybe in comparison to other places it's not even pricey?). Loads of gluten free options.

Relish. also has two vegan-isable burgers on their lunch menu, but who needs lunch when they have all-day breakfast with vegan waffles?!

Relish. Cafe
2 Kingsway Place
Next door to Townsville Bulletin office on Flinders St West (across from Fletcher St)
Monday & Tuesday 6.30am - 2.30pm; Wednesday - Friday 6.30am - 3.30pm; Weekends & Holidays 7.30am - 3pm

Christmas Wrapping

I'll pause my Tasmania recaps, because hey, it's Christmas. It sort of snuck up on us this year. Without going into too much detail, I had a rather busy year this year. It was full of workworkwork, to which I said yes too often and found myself often overwhelmed. And it was a bargaining year - so the union activities added to my things to do, but the whole process also made me feel a bit less generous towards my employer. When you see how little regard management holds staff in, it makes it hard to love what you do, ya know? So I got to the end of November utterly exhausted, and though I've been on holidays since then, I still feel like I'm in recovery mode.

Long story short, the weekend before Christmas I realised I had no plans for a meal or anything. Our Asian grocery store has stopped getting in gluten flour, because their supplier has stopped supplying. So our tradition of a seitan log was out of the question.

Eventually I got it together, though Andy said he would have been happy with just a regular dinner, and our Christmas involved an appropriately festive series of meals, a few little gifts, and some lazy chores (okay, that last part isn't that festive but it's how we roll).

Andy has spent most of the week turning rubbish timber from our neighbour's renovations into a BBQ table. 

We ended up having the Festive Chickpea Tart from Let them eat Vegan!, which we both really liked. It wasn't as firm as Dreena's picture, which probably means I need to process the filling a bit more, but I was nervous about overdoing it.

Along with the tart, we had rosemary, okra and mushroom stuffing (I tried to bake them as stuffing balls but they sort of fell apart), and a simple salad.

With rosemary dressing - 2 Tbsp of fresh rosemary, 1 tsp of dijon mustard, 1 Tbsp of dark tahini, 1 tsp of balsamic vinegar, 2 tsp of pomegranate molasses, and about 1/2 cup of olive oil. Also salt and pepper. Shake it all up in a jar, and then pour it onto salad, stuffing, and chickpea tart. Yum.

On Sunday, Kari posted a raw vegan mango cheesecake recipe to her blog, and my dessert indecision was over. This became our holiday dessert:

Served with extra fresh mango, and at another time with a fruit salad of pineapple, starfruit, kiwifruit and mango, it is pretty much as perfect as you can get for a tropical christmas.

We had our main Christmas meal on Christmas eve, as we always do. When I woke up on actual Christmas, I took Tika for a 7km run (the longest I've ever run in one go, and also enough to bring my annual total from 496 to 503, thus making it to my 2013 running goal). When we got home, Andy was just starting to make breakfast, and it was raining a little bit.

Baked Latkes, from Betty Goes Vegan, became BBQ Latkes. We've been looking for a good hashbrown/latke recipe for many years, but they never seem to work for us. This time, though, we found a winner. Andy sprinkled bacon bits on top at the end of cooking. They were crunchy outside, soft inside, and very delicious.

And with them we had herby mushrooms in a Vegg gravy.

Mushrooms with thyme, parsley and garlic chives.

I spent the morning drinking iced christmassy tea - rosella, cranberry and vanilla, refreshing and a little bit festive. Andy played with the compost while I did laundry.

I got this fancy iced-tea maker when a friend moved overseas, but I cannot for the life of me pour a glass of tea without dribbling heaps. 

And then moved on to this vegan coconut nog (with a splash or five of rum). And salt and vinegar chips for lunch, because tradition.

Some gifties - tea (and a teapot, not in the photo) from Andy's parents, some dried edible seaweed from Andy's co-worker, a seaweed book from Andy's boss, and a tropical gardening book from me. Also coconut nog. 

For dinner, we had more chickpea tart, which Andy reckons is the best savoury tart I've ever made. And grilled pineapple, and garlic bread (and more cheesecake).

And now it's Boxing Day, and we will eat the last of our cheesecake and watch Doctor Who. I hope you've all had as enjoyable a few days as we have!

Andy refused to put on a shirt, Tika refused to sit or stand up, and Nacho refused to come near us.

Betty goes Troppo

Though I will undoubtedly ignore Andy's suggestion that we try every recipe in every cookbook we already have before buying any more, his comment did make me think. I always have stacks of recipes flagged that I want to try, but I don't always get around to it. So I resolved to get around to it. Here are a few of the recipes I've tried in the last two weeks from Betty Goes Vegan.

This cookbook has copped a lot of flak for relying so heavily on mock meats and cheeses. Of course that is a barrier to me trying a lot of the recipes straight away, but when I look at the cookbook I think about whether it would be better with seitan or tofu. I also think that a lot of the recipes are not intended for every day (though I'm sure Betty Crocker genuinely was). So while it's not my go-to cookbook, I appreciate it for what it is. Plus, the recipes I have tried so far have been good.

This one is a bit of a cheat - we had it months ago, not in the past two weeks. 

Curry Spinach and Lentil Pilaf, p.221. I followed the gist of the recipe, but cooked the brown rice and hte lentils together rather than coming to the recipe with both already done. Also (it looks like) I added some red capsicum and maybe zucchini, to up the veggie-quota. Topped with crunchy fried shallots. This was a good one-pot meal that had a gentle zing of curry flavour.

Zucchini Apple Bread, p. 326. Really this is more like cake, obviously. I cut the recipe in half and just made one loaf, but I wish I had done two. This made a great from-the-freezer morning tea to bring to work every day, but only saw us through till Wednesday.

Asian Tofu Steaks with Wasabi Aioli, p.255. Instead of thick steaks, I did nice thin ones. And instead of marinating it, taking it out of the sauce, and baking it separately, we put the whole thing on the BBQ. The sauce thickened up, and the seaweed had Nacho begging to have some plz. Unfortunately for her, we humans loved it too much to share (also soy sauce seems like it wouldn't be good for kittehs).

 Hawaiian Toast, p. 44. Like French toast, but with coconut milk and pineapple juice. We had ours with mango jam. As you can see, it turned out pretty well. I loved it. Andy is lukewarm about french toast, but he ate 4 pieces.

Toffee Bars, p.309. The photo of this one, in the shiny colour pages, grabbed my eye. The recipe was easy enough. So after finishing some writing this weekend well in advance of a deadline, I decided I deserved some slice. I thought they would be very peanutty, but the base tastes more like caramel. Andy didn't like it at room temperature - he thought it was too 'nougatty', whatever that is. But cold, when the base is firm, we both want to eat all the slice.

So I've tried these 5, plus one more when I first got the book, which just leaves me with 494 to go. I've got Vegan Bacon & Kale Scalloped Potatoes on the menu for tonight - 493. But who's counting?

The Vegg

Just before Christmas, we received a wonderful surprise in the mail: a free sample of the Vegg, courtesy of Rocky. The Vegg is a powdered egg yolk replacer. It has a very small ingredients list, which possibly puts it at risk of people reverse-engineering the recipe, but which is a good reminder that vegan replacements of omin favourites don't need to be scary franken-foods.

To use the Vegg, you must first blend up the packet with a litre of water. So note that you will need a blender, or at least a stick blender, to use this product. On opening the packet, I was hit with a strong fart smell, which I suppose is an indication of how authentically egg-like it is! You can blend up smaller amounts, but since it is supposed to keep in the fridge for a few weeks and in the freezer for even longer, I decided to just do it all in one go. We put a small-ish jar in the freezer, used a bit straightaway, and put the rest in the fridge for the next few weeks. We found shaking the jar was enough to re-mix the Vegg before we used it. Just be prepared for that farty smell every time you open the jar.

So what did I do with the Vegg? 

Instead of starting small, to get a taste of it and see how it is, I decided to go the whole hog and attempt to make a poached Vegg. I watched this veggietorial, and despite the very clear statement that an agar-style white would be the best, I went with cornflour. I blended some silken tofu with a little water, some cider vinegar, and salt and pepper, and then cooked it up with some cornflour to thicken it. I put this into 4 silicon cupcake moulds to set up.

The next morning I scooped out a bit of the middle, filled the gap with the Vegg, and then put the scooped-out white stuff back on top. 

I verrrry carefully transferred these to a pan of boiling water, in their silicon moulds, which I guess makes them more "coddled Vegg" than poached. Anywhoo, getting them out of the hot water ended badly only once, but of course (since I didn't use agar) they didn't really set up into anything, so when I flipped it out onto the toast it went a bit mushy.

It was sort of like eating really thick gravy on toast, but that is my fault, not the Vegg's! Andy wasn't too keen on my egg whites - who can blame him? - but he did say that he thought the Vegg part was really very eggy. 

Andy loves poached eggs, but he eats them just about never because I'm so very unhappy when he does, so I am keen to try again with some agar and maybe a better game plan. He doesn't think it is worth the effort, but where's his sense of adventure?! 

Andy sprinkled bac-o's on his poached vegg.

After that failed experiment, we decided the Vegg's strength was more in the dipping arena, so on Christmas morning I poured Vegg into two ramekins and heated them up in a hot water bath, which we had along with our mushrooms, spinach, and toast. Here, the Vegg really shone. Andy poured his over his brekky, while I preferred to daintily dip mine, but we both really enjoyed it.

The next morning Andy heated the Vegg straight up in a saucepan, then threw spinach into it, and finally pouring all of that on top of mushrooms on toast. Again, it was really good here, adding that special something-something to breakfast, and providing something for that last dry corner of toast to mop up at the end of the meal.

Last night I tried putting the Vegg into a chickpea flour quiche, in place of the black salt my normal recipe calls for. I didn't cook the quiche batter long enough, meaning it was sloppy instead of set, meaning I didn't take a photo because it looked a bit like throw-up. It was tasty, but I wouldn't use Vegg in this sort of recipe again. The Vegg quiche tasted almost identical to the usual black salt variety, which is a bit unsurprising given that the Vegg is made of black salt. Although I would like to try some things like french toast, and maybe custard, with the Vegg, I suspect that the majority of our Vegg-use will be poured over mushrooms, or perhaps mixed through tofu scramble. 

At $9 or $10 a packet, the Vegg seems a bit spendy at first, but now that I've seen how far it goes, I think it's actually good value. Andy, a lover of runny egg yolks, really enjoys it. It is the sort of product that would go really well with a microwave, but even without one we have found it an easy and yummy addition to our breakfasts. What I would like to see from the Vegg in the future is the option to buy larger quantities, in a jar or a tub, for example. Either way, I'm looking forward to trying more things with it! Thanks, Rocky!

The three days of Christmas

This year, Andy and I continued some of our earlier Townsville Christmas traditions, which are beginning to cement themselves into place as proper traditions. Basically, we spread things out across Christmas Eve, Christmas Day and Boxing Day.

We have Christmas dinner on Christmas eve. We had, of course, a stuffed seitan roast with yuba skin. I had planned to cook this on the BBQ, so as to avoid heating up the house, but then Christmas eve was rainy and by dinner time it was a chilly 25 degrees, so into the oven it went! 

Christmas dinner, waiting to go in the oven.

The yuba didn't crisp up as much as usual, for some reason, but it was still good.

Along with the seitan roast, we had okra-corn bread stuffing (based on Susan V's recipe), mushrooms baked with garlic-parsley-butter, some (bought) cranberry jelly, and spinach. We topped the seitan with mango chutney, made that morning (which will get its own post soon). 

Tika got a veggie pig's ear, and Nacho had some pumpkin, one of her favourite treats. 

For dessert we had mango-fruit mince ice cream, made with the tropical fruit mince I also used for tarts.

Served up with little pastry bits, the baked scraps from when I made my tarts.

Christmas morning, Andy woke with the beginnings of a sinus infection or summer flu or something, so I cooked him up a nice breakfast and a hot lemon. For breakfast we had creamy mushrooms, spinach, and Vegg (another thing which will get its own post soon) with toast and tea. 

After brekky, we took Tika to the beach, where she chased plenty of sticks, ran around with a few other dogs, and ate too much salt water, making herself a bit sick as a result. 

Then it was back home for a cup of tea (for Andy), a mango-ginger-rum smoothie (for me), and some chocolate and white chocolate spiders, as we opened the gift(s) Andy's parents sent us. 

It was in pieces when we opened it, but a phone call cleared things up - it's a seedling tray, and a little thing for making seedling pots out of old newspaper.

For lunch, Andy cooked up some mushroom burgers with spinach and bacon bits and cranberry jelly.

Which we ate with salt and vinegar potato chips, another of our solidifying christmas traditions.

We spent the rest of the day doing not much - reading books, watching a movie, pulling some weeds in the garden, and drinking rosella cordial.

Our first harvest of rosellas was a small batch, so I only made a little cordial.

Then we ate leftovers for dinner, adding some more mushrooms and spinach to our leftovers, because Andy got a lot of both on Christmas Eve, reduced to clear!

Now all that's left is one piece of seitan, and some sweets. 

Our Boxing Day was pretty similar. For breakfast, we had mushrooms on toast, with spinach and Vegg.

And we spent the rest of the day eating fruit, chocolate spiders, and panadol (for poor sickly Andy). It wasn't the christmassiest christmas - in fact, it didn't really feel terribly christmassy at all. But it suits us - a christmas full of mushrooms, spinach and mangoes is a success, as far as we're concerned. 

Merry Christmas to everyone who celebrated it!

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!