Vegan Carbonara

As I promised at the very end of last year, I have made another batch of Carbonara so I can post the recipe here.

Carbonara is one of those dishes that a lot of people seem to love, but I had never even heard of before I went vegan. So I have no reference point to compare it to. But somewhere along the way I picked up the key ingredients - egg yolks, bacon, cream and pasta. Not super vegan friendly? Think again.

We had some Vegg in the freezer (we blend up the whole packet and freeze in smaller jars), and some imitation bacon bits (fully vegan) that my mum sent over as a birthday present. So the food miles for this are not small! It's not an every week kind of meal, but it is easy, and fast, filling, and really delicious. And unlike chicken's eggs, the Vegg won't "scramble" if you leave it on the heat for too long, so there is less multi-tasking with the vegan version of Carbonara.

Vegan Carbonara

1 Tbsp. olive or coconut oil
3 cloves of garlic, minced
300 grams of mushrooms, thickly sliced
1 Tbsp. vegan bacon bits
1/2 c. prepared Vegg
100 mL coconut cream, soy milk or other non-dairy substitute
400 grams of pasta
parsley, salt and pepper, nutritional yeast, and more bacon bits for sprinkling

Heat the oil in a frying pan over pretty high (not quite the highest) heat. Saute the mushrooms until they are soft and the liquid has evaporated from them. The high heat helps evaporation to happen faster, so your mushrooms brown instead of boiling in their weird mushroom water. Stir in the garlic and bacon bits and mix it all around for a minute. Add Vegg and soy milk and turn the heat to low and leave it, stirring every now and then, while your pasta cooks. Boil water (boiling in the kettle is more efficient than the stove, I hear), cook spaghetti or other pasta until it is al dente, or mushy if that's your thing. Drain, dump it into the pan with the sauce, and stir it all up. If it's a bit claggy, throw in some more soy milk. It should be creamy and saucy and good. Season with salt and pepper to taste, and serve with parsley, nutritional yeast, and moar bacon bits.

It's worthing getting some Vegg for this - which reminds me, I need to order some more. I honestly will probably never attempt a vegan poached egg again, but Vegg makes a rocking carbonara.

Pumpkin Risotto, three ways

Andy and I discovered the joys of pressure cooker risotto over a year ago now - some chopping, less than 15 minutes of cooking, and voila! Dinner on the table, and not a bad rendition of risotto for no stirring. As such, it has become a pretty regular staple in our weeknight meal rotation, especially since pumpkin is one of the few veggies that is good and available and inexpensive year-round up here.

As I recounted in my original post, one time we improvised, using a thick soup in place of stock in the recipe.  That was a disaster. But more recently, we have tried some safer improvisations, with some success.

Our first rendition is based on the recipe for pumpkin risotto from Urban Vegan - in fact, the only real difference is that our version is pressure cooked. Red wine, sage, sundried tomatoes and pumpkin. And we added broccoli, because, yum. To get the textures right, we put the broccoli stems in early and pressure cooked them. The florets were stirred in after we took the risotto of the pressure, and sitting in the hot risotto for 5 minutes cooked them enough for our liking.

The second variety is herb-centric. Pumpkin, red capsicum, green peas, and sosomany herbs. There were garlic chives, basil, and parsley mixed through this and they made it delicious. The herbs were added right at the end before we served, so they stayed nice and fresh.

Our final attempt was a little on the weirder side, and wasn't perfect but could easily get there. It was a thai-inspired pumpkin risotto. We cooked the rice in some lime juice, instead of the usual wine that is in risotto; lime zest, lemon grass, ginger and garlic flavoured the stock; pumpkin, red capsicum and spinach were then finished off with just a splash of coconut cream. Unfortunately, the risotto was pretty soupy even before the coconut cream was added - I think more liquid came off the pumpkin than I was expecting. Still, the flavours were fab and thai-inspired risotto should totally be a Thing.

From the Garden

Practically since we moved in to our house almost a year ago, we have had a semi-productive garden which we've used to supplement our purchases of fresh produce. Now that we've been here a while, it's starting to get really good. Have a look at these meals that centred on the harvest from our own back yard.

This BBQ dinner is eggplant parma with sauteed luffa, potatoes and salad. The luffa was sauteed with lime juice which we were gifted from a friend's tree.

We grew the eggplant, all the salad ingredients - cucumber, basil, tropical spinach and chilli - and luffa. The luffa are a zucchini-like climbing vine which, if you let it get bigger, can be turned into the fancy bath sponges you buy from shops. This is what they look like when they are small.

And here is how they look when they grow.

Another night we made sushi. We used bought rice and seaweed, and condiments for dipping. But we grew all the fillings - eggplant that we marinated, snake beans, and cucumber.

Served with a side of sauteed luffa.

Andy's dad made the chopping board. I reckon her should go into business.

The cucumbers we're growing at the moment aren't your typical green variety. They're called "giant russian" and when I first saw one on the vine I thought we'd accidentally grown a butternut pumpkin!

And these nachos were made with black beans, tinned tomatoes, homegrown capsicum and chillies, and my favourite part...

Home grown sweet potatoes.

So we're not obligate locavores yet, but our locallivory is increasing. I just can't wait until our fruit trees start producing.

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!

Birthday Weekend

As I said in my Jervis Bay post, we've had a few busy weekends in a row. The weekend after we returned from the south coast we had many things on - it was my birthday, and it was also the weekend of the Travelling Film Festival in Townsville, and we had our usual garden / house stuff to do.

I saw 5 films with the Travelling Film Festival (Andy saw 2 with me). My favourite of the weekend was easily Searching for Sugar Man, a really intriguing documentary about a musician I'd never heard of before, but wish I had. He was big in South Africa (what the film is about) and Australia, but was a total flop in the US. The first half of the film is dark and broody, but for the second half I couldn't really stop smiling because it was just so... uplifting. I really recommend this movie.



My second favourite was Moonrise Kingdom, a Wes Anderson film. I love his other work, and this one was similarly story-book quirky and just charming.

Paul Kelly: Stories of Me was a really interesting film about Australia's most prolific singer-songwriter. It was a little disjointed - more a biography than a narrative about something interesting, in the way that Sugar Man is.

Lore, a story about the children of an SS Officer right at the end of WWII who have to travel across Germany, and end up travelling with a Jewish man leaving a concentration camp, was heavy and thought-provoking and interesting. It was no light film, but it was worthwhile.

Chinese Takeaway was really sweet - a comedic look at some serious subject matter, but I was taken aback by the way that many people in the audience laughed uproariously at bits that I thought were more sad than funny. That aside, the film was really gorgeous.

In between the films, I had a friend over for dinner on Saturday evening. Then on Sunday (my actual birthday) I had a couple of people over before we went to see Paul Kelly and Chinese Takeaway. Since the films started at 6.30pm, I thought some heartier food was in order. So I made a batch of focaccia, with tomatoes and basil and garlic on top.

And of course some cake. Or rather, macadamia blondies. This is the recipe from Vegan with a Vengeance.

The recipe had a topping involving maple syrup and more macadamias, but I decided to go for a simple salted caramel topping instead. Baked on the blondies for the last 10 minutes, it was a little sticky-sweet without being overly messy.

These, plus some mojitos, made a great Sunday afternoon with friends. So even though the weekend was busy, it was all fun stuff!

Blenderiffic

Having a blender/mixer thingie has revolutionised the way we cook.

Okay, I may be exaggerating a leetle bit. Or perhaps I'm exaggerating a whole awful lot. But a blender is better than a stick blender for things aside from smoothies.  Things like...

Tofu mayo. Caper and garlic chive flavoured. Which made a totally beautiful potato salad dressing.

And pesto. Yeah yeah, pesto is totally make-able, and arguably better, when done by hand in a mortar and pestle, but let's be honest. I haven't made pesto by hand in years, so a blender is pretty awesome. Plus, Andy went on a field trip which was wayyyy over-catered, and brought home some pinenuts. So we stuck those into our little "Magic Bullet-ish" attachment with some basil, garlic, salt and olive oil, tossed it onto gnocchi, and dinner took less than 10 minutes total.

Chocolate mousse! Though, this version probably doesn't deserve an exclamation mark. It should have been good - 1 block of silken tofu; 100gms of dark chocolate, melted; a big scoop of peanut butter; a shake of cinnamon. Blended. But it was just missing some essential sweetness. The bitterness of the chocolate overpowered everything else, so that you couldn't even taste peanut butter or cinnamon. So, no win there, but lots of ideas for future mousse experiments. And, smooth & fluffy-riffic, thanks to the blender.

Despite being disappointing, it was still good to eat with some Soyatoo whipped cream and rainbow sprinkles. Because really, what isn't?

And I will leave you with this photo of Andy draining the final dregs of the Soyatoo, which were no longer aerated and tasted overwhelmingly sweet and vanilla-y. 

You'll have to ask him if this was a good life choice or not.

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.

Some Things Vegans Eat - pasta

Pasta is a quick and easy meal, and can be done as simply or as fancy as you feel like.

Once, when I was young, I had dinner at a family friend's house and she served Spaghetti Pie.  It was wonderful - crunchy on the bottom and sauce on the top, with all the starchy goodness of pasta in the middle.  I tried to recreate this pie, based on vague memories.  But Andy baulked at the idea of a sauce-less layer of pasta, so I tossed some Spag-Bol sauce through the pasta, and then poured extra sauce on top before baking.  It did get crunchy around the edges, but it wasn't quite what I was looking for.  Good, anyways, and a good way to use up leftover sauce.

 Store-bought gnocchi is one of the quickest dinners there is.  This one is topped with a jar of sauce which we jazzed up with some eggplant and capsicum.  Next to the gnocchi is some leftover cauliflower-in-cream sauce, and fresh tomatoes.  Perfect for those days when I'm teaching until 5pm.

Andy made this light, summery pasta dish when it started to warm up and we decided we needed to shift our meals to reflect the change in seasons.  Tomato, green beans, cannellini beans, lemon juice and fresh dill lifted this pasta to light and tangy heights.