Soft Foods

I have a tendency to deny that anything is wrong with me until it is really, really wrong. Like in 2010, when my appendix burst on a Monday morning and I didn't actually seek medical attention until Friday morning. The result is pretty much always worse than if it was dealt with promptly - after my appendix was removed I should have been out of hospital within a day, but I had to stay for a few while I was hooked in to antibiotics.

I've done it again, with a much less intrusive body part this time. I have bad teeth - not in a crooked sense, but in a cavity sense. I maintain good dental hygiene, but I grew up without fluoridated water and probably ate too much sugar as a child. I also didn't go to the dentist for several years, because last time I went the dentist was judgmental and mean.

I finally decided to bite the bullet, find a nice dentist, and get everything fixed. But between the first assessment appointment and my first fixing appointment, I got a terrible tooth ache. Enough to keep me awake 2 nights in a row. I had to get one of my wisdom teeth removed.

I had a few days of eating completely smooth things - pretty much exclusively pumpkin soup and smoothies. But after the anaesthetic wore off, I really craved something that I could chew. I don't know why - maybe the action makes it feel more like eating, and thus more satisfying. But these are some of the soft meals we came up with.



 A chickpea & sweet potato tart, adapted from a recipe in Let them eat Vegan! This had a head of broccoli blended through it to maximise nutrition and flavour while minimising chunky bites. This meal served two dinners, since we only ate half on the first night (with potatoes). Here it is on the second go, served with some terrible looking "leftover fritters". Andy mixed up some leftover rice, leftover pumpkin soup, and leftover ful (like a dhal, but made with fava beans), and some frozen peas, and made them into patties. They were soft, rather than crunchy, and with small bites were very easy to eat.


 Bangers and mash is another easy to eat meal. The veggie sausages we used are quite soft on their own, and again cutting them into small bites made them even easier to eat. And mashed potatoes are one of my ultimate comfort foods. On top, Andy whizzed together some hummus and pesto to make a gravy-like sauce.



 For breakfast, I switched from drinkable smoothies to spoon-worthy ice creams. This one is simply a few frozen bananas, some frozen blueberries, and a scoop of tahini. Blended all together in the food processor, it was a yummy but really very healthy soft serve.

My new (nice) dentist is recommending that I have my other wisdom teeth removed in the near future, so I'll be on the lookout for more of these soft but not smooth recipes. Any suggestions?

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!

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.

Produce - Big and Little

Andy and I have big appetites, so we love our veggies in giant proportions. Our favourite winter veggie in the garden is kale. It's getting to the time of year now that they are full of caterpillars. Andy is still happy to eat them, but I get a little grossed out at the idea. And on the weekend Andy cooked one, and it ended up in my bowl. That put my off my pasta.

But caterpillars aside, we prefer our kale to come in mountains, rather than the tiddly bunches you get in supermarkets.

Kale mountain.

Kale with cauliflower, jacket potatoes and corn cooked on the BBQ, and a tomato and cucumber salad

And when choosing a sweet potato at the market last week, Andy chose this gigantor. That's 2.4 kilos, or 5 pounds, of a single sweet potato.

Sweet potato chips with black bean burgers (recipe from Celebrate Vegan)

But sometimes we don't have as much success. We tried to grow a row of carrots, and they were pretty puny.

Tiddly carrots. We roasted them with Aloo Palak Pie.

And our corn grew really quickly and looked great, but was very small. Tasty, but tiny.

Not done yet. 

BBQ corn with pumpkin, potatoes and carrot, and Chickpea Pumpkin Seed Burgers (recipe from Let them eat vegan!)

The corn and carrots do prove that sometimes the smallest produce are the sweetest and tenderest. But we still love giants.

Deliciously Healthy

Over the course of this year, I've noticed us shifting to a healthier way of eating. This isn't to say that we ate badly before - in fact, we generally tried to avoid bad food. But in the last few months we've shifted to actively choosing good things, instead of just avoiding the bad. I think this comes down to a few things. One is more awareness. Another is that as I do more exercise, I am hungrier and want to eat better to stay fuller longer. And a big reason is that we are much more financially comfortable now, so buying nuts and unusual grains and flours is something we can afford to do with a bit more regularity now.

One of the things that has made it much easier to shift to healthier eating is the fantastic, delicious, but very health conscious cookbook, Let them eat Vegan! by Dreena Burton. We just love it. Here are some of our winners.

"Fit-tuccine Alfredo". We skipped the chanterelle bread crumb topping, and served it on penne pasta with zucchini, broccoli and capsicum. Based on cashews, this sauce is suuuuper creamy and really delicious.

Raw-nch Dressing! [original exclamation mark] Made with a big handful of fresh parsley, this was fresh and creamy and filling. 

Perfect on a salad with enchiladas and corn on the cob. 

White bean mashed potatoes. This was a bit of hassle to make, and Andy didn't think it was worth it, but it really is much healthier than regular mash. With eggplant parma, sauteed gai lan, and roasted radishes.

Yellow Sweet Potato Chickpea Pie with Basil. This recipe, or some variation of it, is one of our favourites from the book. It's easy to make, and easy to modify, and really delicious. We have only ever made it with orange sweet potatoes, and sometimes use white beans instead of chickpeas, but it is always delicious. Unfortunately, it may have killed my blender last week. 

The star of this pizza is Romesc-oat Sauce, a roasted capsicum-based thick spread with the nutty taste of toasted almonds and toasted oats. 

BBQ Sunflower Tofu, cooked on the BBQ instead of in the oven. Easy peasy, delicious, made with sunflower butter for a different kind of taste. With BBQ eggplant, rocket, and bok choy. 

Jerk Chickpeas, with added eggplant and rocket. 

Lemon-Infused Mediterranean Lentils - made with veggies mixed in, and a little bit saucier. 

There are lots of gems in this cookbook. It makes me want to look more into Dreena's recipes - but Andy thinks I should make more things out of the cookbooks we have before I get more new ones!

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!

Let us eat vegan!

We have been loving our new cookbook, Let Them Eat Vegan! by Dreena Burton. We've enjoyed everything that we've tried so far, and have lots more recipes tagged to try. It's healthy, but in a gourmet way. The flavour combinations are sophisticated and the recipes centre on veggies, beans and whole grains - which really suits the sort of food we've been eating a lot this year, anyways.

Our first try from the cookbook was Jerk Chickpeas. I googled it afterwards, and found it all over the internet - my first choice of recipe was one that had been released as a teaser! But I can see why - they were easy to make, and very delicious. We made ours on the BBQ, rather than the oven, roasted some eggplants in them as well, and made them spicy. At the end of cooking, we mixed through some rocket from the garden, and put them in wraps.

White Bean Mashed Potatoes were a yummy and healthy side dish, but a bit more work than I prefer side dishes to be. Potatoes, pumpkin and cannellini beans mixed together were creamy and rich without being super fatty. We had them with eggplant parma, tahini-garlic gai lan, and roasted radishes.

Andy wasn't sold when I told him I would make Lemon-Infused Mediterranean Lentils. He doesn't like the idea of brown lentils just generally, even though when I do cook them, he generally likes them. The same happened with this dish - he liked them so much, he ate two HUGE bowls full. I didn't follow the recipe exactly - I added some zucchini and eggplant to the mix, and made it saucy, and it was fantastic served over rice. The saucy-stewy lentils were a great cold-weather meal, but the lemon juice and zest kept it from feeling stodgy.

Tonight's dinner was similarly "based on" with lots of changes, this time based on Yellow Sweet Potato Chickpea Pie with Basil. I used orange sweet potato and cannellini beans instead of chickpeas. This was much better than most of the quiche-type things we have made in the past, partially because it doesn't try to be a quiche at all. The slight sweetness from the sweet potato, the aniseedy basil, and the creamy beans all combined into something magical. Andy suggested (and I agree wholeheartedly) that these would be great at a party in mini form.

 This is my current go-to book for recipes when we've got veggies I can't decide what to do with. I'm very glad I got this book!

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!